Agile Portfolio Management Melbourne Meetup

On 15 February at 6:30PM, I’ll be giving a talk “The Big Picture: Agile Portfolio Management in the Scaled Agile Framework”  to the Agile Melbourne meet up. You can register here.

Also, we still have room available to attend my Melbourne Lean|Agile Leadership Workshop On February 14&15, or in Wellington, NZ on Feb 28&29. You can register for either here.

Last month, Chad Holdorf of John Deere (Chad calls himself ISG’s agile ninja, though I have yet to see this on his business card) and I gave keynote talks at Rally Software’s Agile Portfolio Management Roadshow event in Dallas, Texas . My talk was on Agile Portfolio and Program Management. The video of my talk is posted here.

Chad’s talk (video posted here) was an update on the ISG transformation, and he provided some quantitative results of the effort. It still amazes me when I see the hard data on the incredible impact enterprise agility can have on business, market, and culture.

Below is some of the data from Chad’s talk. I’m betting you’ll be impressed too.

Quality and Responsiveness

Quality stats are some of the most easily measurable results.  Here are the ISG quality results (year over year comparison):

Warranty expenses            Down 50%

Field resolution time         Down 42%

Time to Market

Next, time to market improvements:

First to market                    Up 20%

Time to production            Down 42%

Morale and Engagement

Next, and how do the teams feel about the transformation?

Employee Engagement       Up 7% (based on survey)

I also found this chart particularly interesting:

That data seems pretty unambiguous, eh?

Kaizen Mind

These results reflect just the first year of the transformation. I also know for certain that Deere has kaizen mind (continuous improvement fueled by a constant sense of competetive danger), so I can’t wait for next year’s results. Neither can ISG. Here’s what Tony Thelen, Director, Intelligent Solutions Group, says about the rationale for the transformation, the results to date, and his expectations for the future:

“Our rational for moving to agile development was simple:  to improve the time to market and quality of ISG’s technology solutions so our customers can better address the challenge of feeding the world’s growing population. I am extremely proud of our teams for navigating the complex personal and organizational change dynamics necessary to adopt agile and achieve these results. But this is just the start, not the end of our journey, and we are absolutely committed to improving on these results month after month and year after year.”

Background on John Deere ISG

John Deere Intelligent Solutions Group plays a key role for Deere & Company in designing and delivering the technology needed by its customers to help them meet the challenge of growing more food and building much-needed infrastructure – challenges that must be met as the world’s population is expected to grow to 9 billion people by 2050.  The Intelligent Solutions Group is a great place to work, too. John Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group designs displays and receivers, guidance systems, field and crop management tools, and information and logistics systems that customers rely on when they use John Deere equipment with satellite-based global positioning to advance their productivity. Deere employees leverage Agile project methods to deliver the most advanced innovations to the company’s products. These methods foster a creative environment where employees feel empowered to put their best ideas forward and forge their own career path.

Jobs at John Deere ISG

Like every successful technology business, Deere is routinely recruiting talented people for employment. If you are interested in exploring a career with Deere to build software with agility, and more importantly, to help address the challenge of feeding the world, contact Arneda Shelton and check out: www.johndeere.com/careers/

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.

See them all at scaledagileframework.com.

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!

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.

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!