BECOMING AGILE: FROM CLASSROOM TO BUSINESS IMPACT Rachel Alt-Simmons - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

BECOMING AGILE:

FROM CLASSROOM TO BUSINESS IMPACT

Rachel Alt-Simmons, MS, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM, Lean MBB

Agile Project Management Professor at Boston University, Metropolitan College

Project Management in Practice Annual Conference http://www.projectmanagementinpractice.com

THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT JOURNEY

2570 BC 208 BC 1917 1930s 1957 1962 1969 1987

GLOBAL IT SPENDING IT’S A TECHNOLOGY WORLD OUT THERE…

Gartner forecasts that worldwide dollar- valued IT spending will grow 3.2% in 2014

• r 3.7% when measured in constant

currency, reaching $3.8 trillion as the world economy gradually recovers. Are we doing any better at delivering technology projects?

4

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions Working software Customer collaboration Responding to change OVER Processes and tools Comprehensive documentation Contract negotiation Following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

http://www.agilemanifesto.org/

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Then all this craziness happens…

CS634 AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

THE APPROACH

STUDENT PERSONA

Lean Scrum XP

• Customer focus
• Value-added

processes

• Right-sized for

the organization

• Scalable

structure and routine

• Defined roles

and responsibilities

• Technical

discipline Empowered, self-organizing teams more about agile frameworks so that they can become excellent agile development team members and evangelist-coaches in their organizations BU MS- CIS students who want to learn In the wild, there is no such thing as a “perfectly” applied methodology implementation.

CS 634 AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Our journey…

CS 634 AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT GROUP PROJECT RETROSPECTIVE

Attributes Overview The Good Needs Improvement

Empowered team

• Three full sprint cycles and a

release

• Team members shared roles /

responsibilities

• Instructor as agile coach
• Team gelled!
• Settled into routine
• Communication

Customer-centric

• Product vision
• User personas
• User stories
• Sprint themes and goals
• Understood the significance
• f user-centric design and

development

• Estimation process
• Slipped into old habits
• Learning curve with agile PM

tool

• Dedicated product owner

(instructor / facilitator) Inspect-and-adapt

• Technical practices / testing

approach

• Retrospectives
• Definition of Done
• Retrospectives
• Identification and ownership
• f action items

CS 634 AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT SPRINTS: A LITTLE BUMPY…

Sprint 1: Conservative estimate of velocity; utilization of spikes and knowledge gathering Sprint 2: Progress, but process hiccups; problems with consistency and communication Sprint 3: Finding the groove

• Google hangout

improves communication

• Ambitious user stories

are pushed into later releases

• Team updates

“definition of done”

• Team not prepared for sprint

review / retrospective – allowed to defer to sprint 2

• Web domain crashes and nobody

escalates

CS 634 AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IT’S A REAL WORLD AFTER ALL!

• Students were more likely to have baseline experience or knowledge of agile
• The real world is complex and messy – organizational scenarios defy out-of-

the-box fit with a single project delivery methodology

• Delivery approaches need to be right-sized to fit the project and
• rganizational culture – make it yours!
• Don’t underestimate the some of the cultural challenges within your
• rganization that will impact core aspects of agile (empowerment, customer-

focus, velocity)

• Agile is not a silver bullet! Keep your line of sight on continuous and

incremental improvement

CS634 AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT RELEASE (AND BIRTHDAY) PARTY!

Brian (new dad) Michael (always cheerful) Aditya (graduating!) Rachel (birthday) Radhika (helper extraordinaire) Isha (quietly curious)

Agile is about people

JOIN ME FOR CS634 IN SUMMER II!!

raltsimmons@gmail.com LinkedIn: Rachel Alt-Simmons