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Delivery At Scale 1: The Scaling Challenge

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Agile Delivery At Scale Series Part 1: The Scaling Challenge Part 2: Organizing for Scaled Delivery Part 3: Scaling the Product Backlog Part 4: Delivery Planning and Execution at Scale Summary This post is part 1 of a 5-part series that discusses the challenges of scaled agile delivery. Non-proprietary solutions are proposed that emphasize simplification…

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Delivery At Scale 2: Organizing for Scaled Delivery

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Organizing for Scaled Delivery Summary Getting the right organizational structure in place is a critical prerequisite for successful scaling. Traditional functional silos do not scale, and create flow-impeding dependencies between teams. A value stream mapping exercise can help ensure teams are focused on customer value delivery, have clear missions, and can operate with maximum independence…

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Delivery At Scale 3: Managing the Product Backlog at Scale

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Summary At scale, the definitions of the Product Goal and Product Backlog at scale are unchanged: the Product Goal serves as a target for the Delivery Teams to plan against, the Product Backlog is an ordered list of everything needed to meet the Product Goal. The Product Backlog should be stack-ranked by relative business value….

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Delivery At Scale 4: Delivery Planning and Execution

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Summary Simple planning and execution governance is sufficient to coordinate, communicate and help keep teams and stakeholders informed and aligned. A dedicated role to support for these activities (for example ‘Chief Scrum Master’) is valuable to ensure delivery teams are not distracted from delivery tasks. Planning can be accomplished asynchronously. With appropriate planning detail, execution…

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Delivery At Scale 5: Improvement

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The Improvement System Summary All improvement should be connected to business outcomes. Improvement frameworks can be leveraged to ensure alignment between agile initiatives and business objectives. Improvement initiatives can be managed in the same way as the delivery of new product features: Add to Program Backlogs and apply program governance. A small number of KPIs…

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

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A way to measure the impact of development initiatives on business outcomes A way to measure the value of development initiatives KPI Driver Trees – or Value Driver Trees – are a good way to visualize the linkages between business objectives (Increase Revenue/Decrease Costs/Reduce Risks), the strategy to achieve those objectives (Increase # Visitors/Increase Revenue…

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All Are Change Agents

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What are the challenges in building a culture where everyone is engaged in continuous and sustained improvement? First, an organization’s leadership must be strong (and united) advocates for agile transformation and must communicate expectations that improvement is a fundamental part of everyone’s job – or as Deming once said: “Improvement is not mandatory – neither…

Success With Retrospectives

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According to The Scrum Guide: “The Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for a Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next sprint.”  That was the 2017 version, later expressed more succinctly in the 2020 version to: “The purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to plan ways…

Scrum: Sprint Retrospective

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The Sprint Retrospective What: An opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint. During each Sprint Retrospective, the Scrum Team plans ways to increase product quality by improving work processes or adapting the definition of “Done”, and also ways to increase velocity by…

Scrum: Sprint Review

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The Sprint Review What: Event held at the end of every Sprint to inspect the Increment and adapt the Product Backlog if needed. Who: Scrum Team, Stakeholders. When: At end of each sprint, before sprint planning. Approx. 2 hours for a 2-week sprint.   Agenda Product Owner describes the goals for the sprint and associated…

Scrum: The Daily Scrum

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The Daily Scrum The daily scrum (or stand-up) event is primarily for the development team. Others may attend but not interfere with the proceedings. This event is where the team updates themselves on progress in the last 24 hours, and then aligns on a plan for the next 24 hours that they believe keeps them…

Scrum: Sprint Planning

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Sprint Planning What: Confirm what can be delivered in the upcoming sprint Identify the work needed to deliver the increment Who: Entire Scrum Team: Dev-Team, Product Owner, Scrum Master When: Immediately prior to start of next sprint. Requires approx. 2 hours for a 2-week sprint.   Sprint Planning is a Two-Part Event Sprint Planning Part One:…

Scrum: Backlog Refinement

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Backlog Refinement What: Get User Stories ready: who/what/why acceptance criteria small enough to fit – split if necessary dependencies in place Sized in story points Who: Dev. Team, PO, Scrum Master When: Approx. 2 hours per 2-week sprint   Agenda PO selects stories to refine PO describes story to team, takes questions, clarifies Add/discuss acceptance…

Scrum: SAFe Considerations

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Scrum was introduced to address the unacceptably high failure rate of software projects. (The annually published CHAOS Report by the Standish Group publishes data  on the success rates of IT projects. It was started in 1994 and at that time reported that a startlingly low 16.2% of IT projects are successful). Software development projects can…

SAFe 1: An Introduction to the SAFe® Scaled Agile Framework

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“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. Albert Einstein. Summary SAFe is an agile delivery system for enterprise-scale software development. It is designed to address the limitations of single team-based delivery. In this introduction we discuss: Problems solved by SAFe SAFe framework overview How to implement SAFe Introduction: Why SAFe?…

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SAFe 2: SAFe Portfolio Management

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“Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things”  – Steve Jobs Portfolio Management is the highest level planning process within an enterprise and includes the definition, refinement, prioritization and funding of business strategy initiatives. These initiatives are referred to as epics in SAFe, and once approved at the portfolio level, are translated into implementable features that…

SAFe 3: Program Backlog Construction

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The scaled agile framework (SAFe) enables organizations to transform business needs into working software in a consistent, repeatable way, using lean principles. It’s useful to think of this process as one of continuous and progressive refinement of business requirements until discrete items of value can be accepted by delivery teams for implementation. This is accomplished…