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
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
Think you are Agile? ….how do you know?
I was recently involved in an organization that wanted to transition their software development teams to Agile since 2 of the teams had been doing 2-week iterations for over 6 months. The problem was, that despite the manager yelling that they “were already Agile”, they were not delivering valuable and potentially shippable increments frequently nor consistently (iteration after iteration), nor were they adapting to changing priorities and customer needs along the way.
The essence of Agile is not whether or not a team is doing TDD or pairing or automated regression testing, (although I strongly believe they are all good practices and I evangelize them to all my clients). Being Agile means delivering business value frequently and consistently while adapting to changing business needs. No matter what practices are being followed, if you are not doing this then your not Agile. That’s where assesments come in…
VIDEO – Navigating Conflict on Agile Teams
Lyssa discusses a 5 level model for dealing with conflict on Agile Teams and how to avoid conflict all together. She delivered this at a recent Agile conference in Orlando Florida. She is inspirational and a great teacher.
VIDEO – Interlocking Roads to Agile (3 key leadership roles)
Interlocking Roads to Agile
Lyssa explains the key roles of Agile leadership. Agile Coach, Product Owner and Agile Manager. And how their roles must interlock for organizations to be successful with Agile.
The Road from Project Manager to Agile Coach (3 part video series)
This is a must watch video series if you want to understand what is means to be an Agile Team Coach.
The Road from Project Manager to Agile Coach – Part 1
Read more
WEBINAR – Radical Management: Making the Entire Organization Agile
Organizations today face a crisis. The crisis is of long standing and its signs are widespread. Productivity is one-quarter of 1965 levels. Innovation continues to decline. Workers are disgruntled. Customers are frustrated. Brands are unraveling. Executive turnover is accelerating. In the last 25 years, startups created 40 million jobs in the US, while established firms created almost none. Traditional management is broken.
The principles described in this webinar show how Agile thinking can respond to the crisis and be applied to the overall management of any organization so as to inspire high productivity, continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight.
Multigenerational Teams and Their Impact in Project Management
PMI posts this week that project teams now include people from four different generations.
- MATURES: Older generations (born pre-World War II)
- BABY BOOMERS: Those who grew up in prosperity after World War II)
- GEN X: Younger generations born from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s
- GEN Y: graduates of the new millennium
You can gain some insight into the invisible drivers and behaviors of each group…..and use that to help you deal with
>> Hierarchy and Authority
Business Driven Software Development (webinar series)
Business Agility enables an organization to respond quickly to external forces (such as new market opportunities and competitive forces) as well as to respond quickly to new insights attained internally.
While many organizations have achieved the local optimizations of more effective teams, few have achieved agility at the organizational level. Even when team agility has been achieved, if improvements to how the business is selecting their product enhancements isn’t done, overall return on investment of software development may not have significantly improved.
This series is organized around “roles” - Executives to Team Leads – so each person in an organization can be introduced to what “they” need to know to achieve business agility.
FREE Webinar Series – 7 sessions:
- Session 1 – An Overview
- Session 2 - Product Portfolio Management
- Session 3 – Where to Start Your Agile Transition
- Session 4 – Team Agility: Scrum or Kanban?
- Session 5 - Essential Skills for the Agile Developer
- Session 6 – Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Understand Requirements Up-Front
- Session 7 - The Role of Management in Lean-Agile Transformations
….SCROLL DOWN TO access Recording or to Reserve your seat for the session….
Read more
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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