Agile Transformation challenges and experiences

Topic Title: Agile Transformation – Challenges and Experiences

Initiator: Swati Chintada, Prashanth Prasannathirtha

Participants: Jane Fox, Prachi Jain, Oral Ashley, Amit Bathia, Craig Johnson, Nicole Stuart, Susan Shapiro, Cindy Coventry, Bennis Griffith, Albin Sautiago,  Cristina Lirano, Travis Thompson

Discussion Highlights:

• What are the challenges faced during waterfall to agile transformation?
• large organizations with traditional practices and culture
• service organization; not product oriented
• Challenges:
• client expectation of quick turn around as this is agile!
• lack of fully engaged product owner
• funding projects instead of people (or teams)
• multiple dependencies for large products
• managing work of shared services
• Transformation approach
• cold turkey
• needs support from top leadership
• may cause lot of disruption at various levels
• incremental adoption
• baby steps
• build trust and people as part of transformation
• start with hybrid approach
• Some recommendations:
• use scaling approaches for collaboration if there are too many dependencies
• manage shared services work by adding their work in your product backlog
• engage QA sooner and make them part of team as soon as possible
• use agile for non IT work in the organization. For ex – HT, Finance, Marketing etc
• use relevant metrics
• to measure value delivered rather than how much work has been done
• don’t use metrics that would be counter productive to team or overall org
• create safe environment to innovate, fail, speak-up
• create self organized teams
• documentation
• move from outdated and out of sync documentation to living documentation
• move from hard to search project specific doc to product level documentation
• capture as much technical information and design design decisions along with code