Scaling Software Agility

With Deere’s permission, we’ve chronicled Deere’s Intelligent Systems Group  agile-at-scale, and all-in-really-fast transformation on this blog. There’s another post or two in process. In the meantime, this Computerworld article adds to the story. Pretty cool, really. Great to see a 150 yr old plus company taking the plunge to the latest methods of software development.

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In December, Rally sponsored a series of keynote presentations in conjunction with the product launch of Rally’s Agile Portfolio Manager. One such session was in Dallas in December. There, I gave a talk entitled Agile Portfolio Management with the Scaled Agile Framework. The video of that talk is now posted on line here. (The slides from that talk were posted previously here).

It’s a serious and deep topic, suited for those project, program, development, line of business managers and other executives who share responsible for Strategy and Investment Funding, Program Execution and Governance. It’s a bit of an eye-opener, too.

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Since the Scaled Agile Framework is both broad and deep, we’ve been working on Navigation icons to help keep the user from getting “web vertigo” when they navigate the framework. Here’s an example for the Agile Team icon.

See them all at scaledagileframework.com.

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A reminder that I’ll be delivering a rare, open-enrollement version of my Lean|Agile Leadership workshop in Melbourne, Australia, February 14-15, and Wellington, New Zealand, Februrary 28-29. You can register through Agile University here.

Here is an overview of the workshop.

Leading the Lean|Agile Enterprise: A Two-day Workshop for Leaders, Managers, and Executives.

Overview By Dean Leffingwell

While working with a number of software enterprises in the throes of large-scale Lean|Agile rollouts, one thing is increasingly clear: these rollouts will not reach their full potential until first, mid, and upper-level management is fully on board.

Since Scrum starts bottom-up, or at least the training focuses almost exclusively on the team level, perhaps our expectation has been that awareness of the initiative at the management levels was enough. Perhaps we thought that mangers would naturally fold into the mix and provide the requisite support and leadership needed for success at this next level.

However, I have personally had to reset those expectations for managers in these large-scale Lean|Agile rollouts. It is simply not sufficient to be supportive. Rather they must be engaged, empowered and sufficiently knowledgeable to be able to lead, coach and drive the transition.

Doing, so however, requires orientation and training which does not appear off-the-shelf from the Agile or Scrum community. To this end, my two-day workshop is designed specifically for managers and executives in such a transition. The workshop covers many of the concepts articulated in my recent book, Agile Software Requirements (Addison-Wesley 2011) and is based on the Five Keys to building the Lean|Agile Enterprise:

1. Not Everything is a User Story: Scalable Agile Requirements
2. Think Agile Programs, Not Just Agile Teams: The Agile Release Train
3. Enterprise Systems Require Intentional Architecture: Rearchitecting with Flow
4. Portfolio Management Must be Agile Too: Addressing Legacy Mindsets; creating the Agile PMO
5. Your Enterprise Can Be No Leaner Than the Executives Thinking: Lean Thinking Executives and Kaizen Mind

But this workshop is much broader with the inclusion of the introduction to Lean Product Development and Scaling Leadership modules. You can tell from the learning objectives that this is a serious undertaking:

• Provide a principled, lean and flow-based product development foundation for improving competitiveness, economics and return on investment in product development
• Introduce the basic and advanced Agile principles and practices necessary support large-scale agile software development transformation
• Introduce and experience Scrum as a potential mechanism for implementing team-level software agility
• Introduce and explore the Agile Release Train as a means to provide strategic alignment and implement product development flow across the enterpri
• Provide a leadership framework that helps management facilitate an effective, large-scale, lean and agile transformation
• Provide a set of readings and activities intended to allow the attendees to continue to learn and inculcate these ideas over time

Hope to see you there!

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As readers know, I am typically engaged in a number of simultaneous, larger-scale Lean|Agile rollouts, applying my experiences, my book, Agile Software Requirements, and now the synthesized, and public-facing Scaled Agile Framework to these initiatives. But since my clients are scaling, and agile is increasingly crossing the chasm  from “early adopters” to the “early majority”, I needed to scale myself, too. To this end, we recently formed Scaled Agile Partners, (a DBA for my consulting company, Leffingwell, LLC) and with my partners Alex, Drew, Armond and Colin, we have a lot more capacity to support the rollout of major Lean|Agile transformations. If you are interested, check out Scaled Agile Partners, or ping me.

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We’ve just completed the Beta 1 Release of the Scaled Agile Framework. (see prior posts for history)

Over the last week, we updated the graphic a bit and completed ALL the abstracts for the activities, icons and artifact icons on the Big Picture. In addition, there are currently six Detail pages: Developers and Testers, Roadmap, Vision, Hardening, Agile Teams and Iteration, so we consider ourselves Beta 1 ready.  Additional Detail pages will be coming over the next few months; see the SAF roadmap for a preview of coming attractions.

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Hi,

Over the holidays, I relocated and redirected my blog to this location (scalingsoftwareagilityblog.com). So for whatever it’s worth, if you are here, it’s still me.

Happy Holidays!

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The Scaled Agile Framework collaborators, (Colin, Drew, Matthew, Alex (via Skype) and I) had another JAD session here in Boulder over the last three days. As per our Roadmap and schedule, the website went live at (scaledagileframework.com). However, we’ve had to scope-manage our efforts quite a bit (seems as if we all have day jobs), and have now committed to getting the newly-defined abstract pages in place asap (but not the detail pages). The abstracts are complete now for the Team level; other levels to follow.

We’ll formally announce the Framework around the first of the year, we hope to get all the abstracts in place before then.

And of course, the big Picture evolved for the umpteenth time. Here is the latest: (updated again January 5, 2012)

Scaled Agile Framework Big Picture v0.93 (Updated Jan 5, 2012)

Dec 26 Changes:

•  new logo and redesign, new icons
•  added the Release Train Engineer icon.
•  added a Shared resource icon. (just posted that abstract here)

Jan 5 changes:

• Changed Release Objective to Objectives.
• Moved Inspect and Adapt to logically the “day before” release planning

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I’ll be giving a keynote on Scaling Agility with the Scaled Agile Framework at the upcoming Scaling Agile (Scrum) conference in Frankfurt on July 5th, 2012. On July 3-4, I’ll be delivering my Leading the Lean|Agile Enterprise two-day workshop. You can check it out and register here.

I’ll post additional details on the conference when more information becomes available.

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Mauricio Gaston (“Mo”) Zamora’s (see post) memorial service and celebration of life was held Thursday at the United Methodist Church in Davidson, North Carolina. Mauricio died November 24 (Thanksgiving) while out running with his son Trey, age nine. He was 42.

Mauricio and Pam Zamora were very active in the local community and there were many hundreds of friends, family, church members, and soccer moms-dads-kids in attendance. Pam opened her house to guests thereafter and what a crush that was! (It looked like an entire soccer team was there, in uniform!)

Even though I knew Mo pretty well, I was indeed amazed to find out what an incredible Renaissance person Mo was. He was an accomplished guitarist (classical and electric), woodworker (built guitars and furniture), vinophile (has an amazing wine cellar and his own small vineyard on the property; was the resident wine expert in our partnership – at the reception, we drank only wine that he had made), photographer, soccer player (was invited to practice with a semipro team), soccer coach (see soccer scholarship program below), outdoorsman, scuba diver (his personal dream was to dive the great white sharks-I’m sure he was saving for that upcoming adventure), not to mention husband, father, brother, son, and entrepreneur, agilist and software industry executive.

Mo will be missed in so many ways and he leaves a void that will never be filled. With respect to this blog, and this industry, he was my good friend and partner, an accomplished enterprise agilist who was currently engaged in rolling out lean|agile transformation programs to a number of enterprises. Mauricio was passionate about the business results, the empowerment of self-organizing teams, and the intrinsic motivational and simple humanity benefits that agile can deliver. This was to be his next, full time, career. He’ll leave a void here, too, as now many hundreds of teams, programs, and ultimately, entire enterprises will now never be able to leverage his unique skills.

If we are going to any way make up for this loss to our industry, then we are all going to have to just pick it up a little bit, aren’t we?

For those who knew Mo or are otherwise interested, memorials may be made to:

North Meck Soccer Club, 11138 Treynorth Drive, Suite B, Cornelius, NC 28031 or Davidson United Methodist Church MC, PO Box 718, Davidson, NC 28036. I talked to one of the Meck club coaches and he said that any funds received will be used for a “Mauricio Zamora Scholarship” which will be used to help aspiring youth-athletes participate in a program that they could otherwise not afford (priced a kids soccer uniform lately?). I can just imagine the mental and physical benefits such a scholarship will bring to some number of lucky kids.

Rest in Peace Mo. You will always be missed.

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