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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Intelligent Disobedience makes Great PMs ?
“Intelligent disobedience requires taking risks, creativity, flexibility and perseverance. We need to engage in conversations with stakeholders that are often difficult – conversations that often cause us to lose sleep at night.”
It is something that Warren Buffet admits he didn’t do in the beginning, and should have. So you are not alone if you don’t do this yet.
Agile and Lean practices can help make this easier – since you are talking with the stakeholders and customers much more often. Keeping that line of communication open. It is what allows PMs or ScrumMasters to speak up when danger is seen. Do you speak up?
Great PM’s don’t just “follow the rules”….they put the value of the customer first ! Lets take a look at a great article by Bob McGannon, PMP – that shares how great PM’s do “intelligent disobedience”. – The Agilista PM
How Agile Do We Need To Be?
In the world of project management, there is much being made about the concepts of “agile” and “extreme” project management. This website has an entire department dedicated to just that. This suggests that it is unique and different, and needs to be applied of and thought of in different ways than “normal” project management. In fact, you don’t have to look too far to find articles, discussions and polemics that assert just that.
But how agile is agile? And how agile do we need to be, anyway? And, to be clear about the real question that we should be asking, how unique is agile from what most of us understand project management to be?
The Agile Project Manager: To Facilitate, Serve and Protect
Some agile teams build and maintain their project’s rhythm, happily developing the system. Sure, they may encounter issues–but they can manage those problems and they successfully release the product. No one works overtime, the product owner is happy and the users are happy with the system.
Then there are the other teams. I meet many agile team members who say, “We really need someone full time to help us. We can’t do the technical work and do all the other stuff we need to do for the organization. Maybe if everyone else was agile, we wouldn’t need someone–but we do right now.”
Those teams need agile project managers. Not a directing and controlling project manager, but a facilitative, serving and protective project manager. The agile project manager has several clear roles: to facilitate the team’s process, to serve by removing obstacles and managing risks, and protecting the team from disturbing outside influences.
WEBINAR – Agile Analysis in Action: Incorporating Agile in your BA Work (8/25)
Aug 25, 2010 — 9-10am PDT
The Agile Analysis in Action presentation will provide participants with an example of how Agile practices can be incorporated directly into analysis activities! This is in addition to a brief overview of Agile practices and benefits. Marvin will discuss the benefits of being Agile as an Analyst even if your current organization, client, or boss isn’t ready to cut the cord on traditional software development methodologies like Waterfall.
ATTENDEES WILL LEARN:
- Why Agile works and is such a hot topic today.
- The common characteristics or flavors of Agile.
- What is meant by Agile requirements
- How to respectfully become an Agile infiltrator in a Waterfall world.
- How to incorporate Agile like practices in your daily analysis routine
- About a real world experience in Agile Analysis
- Optional – The IIBA BOK “Agile Analysis extension” teaser
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.
The Agile Business Analyst
Rapidly changing market conditions are requiring companies to shorten delivery cycles and become more responsive to customer expectations. Agile development methodologies are leading the way, helping software development teams adjust to the new economy. Agile challenges our notion of software engineering best practices, project management methodology and how we lead our teams.
The agile movement impacts every role on a project team differently and creates opportunities to learn new skills and develop new ways of working together.
WEBINAR RECORDING – Creating Effect Maps
Gojko Adzic returned to illustrate how to create “Effect Maps” to manage requirements and do better Acceptance Test Planning – he will walk us through a sample problem.
He will also answer some questions we didn’t have time to answer from our webinar from a few weeks ago titled: “Effective Specifications for Agile Projects“.
1. Regulated environments/traceability
How do you sell Agile in an enterprise where audit department wants to have evidence for each change in requirements?
In a regulated industry, how do you do specs when the stories for the release are not defined at the start of the project?
What should system requirements look like when using Agile in an FDA-regulated industry? When are they “done”?
Fixed Price Contracts for Agile Teams
Fixed price contracts are evil – this is what can often be heard from agilists. On the other hand those contracts are reality which many agile teams have to face. But what if we try to tame it instead of fighting against it? How can a company execute this kind of contract using agile practices to achieve better results with lower risk? This article will try to answer those questions.
Thanks goes out to Marcin Niebudek for posting an article on InfoQ on this hot topic….we are sharing it with you here.
So let’s start with the contract itself.
Fixed Price, Time and Scope
Fixed price contracts freeze all three magical factors at once – money, time and scope. Are the price and time a problem for agile teams? Well they shouldn’t be. In fact, time boxing is common agile practice. Limiting money simply makes time boxing work better.
A real problem with fixed price contracts is the scope, which is fixed in terms of what should exactly be built instead of how much should we build.
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.”
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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