A Success Story – Mixing Scrum and Waterfall
Hear about a real life Very Large, Complex, Multi-year and Distributed project at a leading corporation where using Agile practices were introduced in a very Waterfall traditional environment.
A seasoned PM Consultant, Donnla Nic Gearailt, shares her experience as the Project Manager of a team with responsibilities for the development of NEW software for businesses globally, ranging from tactical bug fixes, to complete system rewrites and re-engineering, to adding new modules to existing systems.
She shares with us in a 30 minute interview:
- How Waterfall and Scrum fit into her project lifecycle
- What happened before Scrum Sprints started
- How Estimating was done with the team and ultimately got management approval
- What the Team looked like and roles on the team (ie. Project Manager, Product Owner, Stakeholders Business Users, Development, Testing and Release)
- How her mixed project was integrated with the other waterfall-only projects
- How dependencies between projects were handled
- How the Backlog was managed and what was in the backlog
- What the Scrum Sprints looked like – duration – activities – stand-ups
- What documentation was used ?
- How Collaboration was encouraged and achieved with such a distributed team.
- LOOKING BACK – Donnla also shares what made the project a great success, and key factors any company should consider in mixing Agile & Waterfall when starting to use Agile in their Waterfall world.
SPEAKER: Donnala Nic Gearailt is a Project Management Consultant with CROM Consulting Ltd. She has been leading and participating in Agile teams for over 4 years and over 8 years in Financial Projects. She has also played the role of Portfolio Manager, Business Analyst and Developer — and now is the Project Manager of teams. She has extensive experience in managing projects with many dependencies on other teams and in dealing with the associated issues, such as getting her projects on to the relevant prioritization lists and executed.
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WEBINAR – Role of Management in Lean-Agile Transformations (8/25)
August 25 — 12-1 pm PDT
Management has long seemed to be the forgotten aspect of Lean-Agile organizations. Many in the agile community even talk about protecting their teams from management. This session discusses how management is an essential aspect of any lean-agile transition that involves more than just a couple of teams. While the business side of the organization must select the proper product enhancements to work on and the teams must actually do the work, management’s role is just as critical. It must provide the organizational structure that allows for the flow of ideas to be manifested as value to the customers. Lean-thinking provides new opportunities for managers to lead, coach and support their teams in order to accomplish this.
* Managers as leaders, coaches and agents of organizational change
* Why managers are essential to lean-agile transformations
* How Lean-Thinking enables managers to improve the organization
The Role of the Manager in Scrum
When an organization starts to explore Scrum, there’s often an uncomfortable moment early on when someone points out that the role of “manager” seems to be missing entirely. “Well I guess we’ll have to just get rid of ‘em all!” wisecracks one of the developers, and all the managers in the room shift uncomfortably in their seats.
Scrum defines just three roles – Product Owner, Team, and ScrumMaster – and the basic direction given to others in the organization is to “support them, or get out of their way”. This is not very detailed advice, especially if you’re a manager expected by senior management to ensure everything goes well.
The traditional role of the manager in the corporate world is based on a model known as “command and control”. Here, the job of the manager is to identify what needs to be done, to issue detailed instructions to the employee, and then to ensure the employee completes the work according to the instructions. The role of the employee in this model is simply to follow the directions as given, trusting the judgment and wisdom of the manager to ensure that the right work is being done in the right way.
VIDEO – Through the Lean Looking Glass
Christophe Louvion tells the story of an online advertising company which had to give up using Scrum because it did not create enough business value although the development was delivering working software. They chose to use Kanban instead, applying Lean principles at all levels of the organization, resulting in true self organizing teams, accelerated rate of change, and better financial results.
Christophe Louvion started working on shopping search engines as VP of Engineering at Shopzilla, he was the CTO of Gorilla Nation, an online advertising company, and currently is the CTO of Citysearch. Louvion is a Certified Scrum Coach, and an active member of the Lean-Agile leadership community.
Thank you InfoQ for posting.
Click Here to access webinar
VIDEOs – User Story Mapping for managing Backlogs
A prioritized user story backlog helps to understand what to do next, but is a difficult tool for understanding what your whole system is intended to do. A user story map arranges user stories into a useful model to help you
- understand the functionality of the entire system/solution,
- identify holes and omissions in your backlog, and
- effectively plan holistic releases that delivery value to users and business with each release.
Find out the different ways Agile teams can deal with users and then dig in deep into story mapping. Jeff Patton says:
“For me, the story mapping thing is going back to using the story as a genuine conversation to actually drive understanding of the system, not as what I’ve seen it become – molecular conversation about the details of a particular feature and how we’re going to test it.”
VIDEO – Getting ready for Iteration 1
How do you know you are ready to start iterating?
In some cases, very little is needed before the first iteration. In other cases, rushing to iterate (because you were told to) can lead to weeks of time wasted overly focused on delivering a poorly understood product.
In this presentation by David Hussman at Agile Mumbai 2010 Conference, Dave provides…
- concrete tools for discovering your product context
- tools for assessing whether you are ready to start building and / or iterating
- tools for defining how much process you need
- tools for truly understanding what you are building and why,
- …as well as who will use it, why they will (or will not) use it and why.
Holistic Agility needed for Scaling
If you want to scale Agile to the enterprise, then lets take a look at a few great points that Forrester presented from their Q2-2010 survey results this week that verified the need to scale Agile beyond a single team.
You’ve heard in many of my webinars that adoption of agile methods is not always smooth and many organizations are experiencing obstacles to their acceptance.
There is great news to share.
Agile is going Mainstream
It was interesting to see Forrester acknowledge that Agile is going mainstream and most certainly crossing the proverbial business chasm that Geoffrey Moore talks about in his book “Crossing the Chasm“. Moore divides organizations into 5 groups as shown in Figure below.
WEBINAR – Effective Specifications for Agile Projects
Fast turnaround and short iterations require a very efficient and precise specifications process to provide direction. Two emerging practices of specification “by example” and “agile acceptance testing” enable agile teams to specify, deliver and verify better. This webinar will teach you about these practices and how to implement them in your project.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- how to ensure a shared understanding of specifications by all stakeholders
- how to manage requirements to provide details just in time & ensure all development team members have enough information to work
- how to ensure that the product built is fit for purpose
- how to know when you are really done with a story
- how to facilitate change in software with live documentation
WEBINAR – Necessary Conditions for Enterprise Agile Success: The subtle stuff you’re probably getting wrong (7/21)
Thursday, July 21, 2010 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM PDT
Agility and leanness are goals almost every organization around the globe are reaching for today. Agile success stories and ROI statistics propel executives to insist upon a new way of managing IT and developing software. However, this commitment is often made without a sufficient understanding of the broad reach of agile implementations nor the cultural change necessary to experience true success. In this 90-minute presentation, Certified Scrum Practitioner Katie Playfair will examine where narrow applications of agile can go wrong and how to make sure your agile and Scrum transition gets the kind of results your organization is expecting.
COST: Free
CERTIFICATION – Lean-Agile Project Management Course (7/26-28)
July 26-28, 2010
Location: CALIFORNIA (Los Angeles/Orange County area)
This course prepares a person to play the role of the Lean-Agile Project Manager. In today’s world it is critical that one know why Agile works, not just be given a set of practices to coach the team in performing. While Scrum is a popular Agile method today, it is not always the best Agile method to use. This course introduces the participants to the three most popular Agile methods: Scrum, Kanban and Scrumban – all within the context of Lean-Agile methods.
- Understanding and managing the Lean Enterprise
- Lean Principles and Agile Practices
- Effective vs Efficient Process Management
- Defining and Managing the Value Stream
- Identifying and eliminating waste from projects
Why cycle time is more important than capacity utilization- How to manage your work in progress (WIP)
- How to create visibility both to and from the team
- Portfolio/Roadmap (Managing Lean Requirements Flow)
- Using Lean Principles to guide Agile Methods (Scrum, Kanban, XP)
- Agile Estimation Techniques
My Speaking Engagements …..
-June 2: WEBINAR - Becoming Agile -June 15: PMI California Inland Empire -Sep 9: So Calif Quality Assurance Assoc Let’s Connect!
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