Overselling Agile Certifications and Frameworks : Presented by Sridharan Vembu

S r i d h a r a n V e m b u

ARE THEY OVERSELLING THE AGILE FRAMEWORKS AND CERTIFICATIONS

Discuss Agile - Hyd / Pune - 21/22 Nov 2015

✤ This presentation is copyrighted to Sridharan Vembu of ThoughtWorks Technologies Ind Pvt. Ltd. No copy or use of this presentation should occur without prior permission

this is something that puzzles me for quite sometime..

and, I’m going to try and solve this puzzle together with you…

let me share a success story with you..

This company is World’s most innovative Electronics giant and a household name across the globe…

this company is World’s most innovative Electronics giant and a household name across the globe…

around 5 years ago, they came up with a renewed vision to try and turn around company’s fortunes

Part of this vision was a complete redesign of the digital marketing platform across the globe

This initiative was under one of the affiliated companies of this global giant

ThoughtWorks partnered with this company exactly three years ago to help them achieve this goal

Global Web Transformation Program - at a glance

100+ countries, 130+ locales

7 timezones

15K + unique pages to be created

100K+ products

300K+ Responsive Images

10+ different vendors

5 Waves - 5 regions

Close to 100 regional systems getting phased out

2 failed prior attempts

ZERO downtime - 2 years since 1st Go-Live

3 weeks deployment cycle - Concept to Production

3-6 m USD yearly saving

Continuous Delivery (incl. automated deployments till Prod)

250+ members (peak size)

Global Web Transformation Program - at a glance

Global Solutions Unit!

!!!!!!!!!

GWT Program!!!!!ThoughtWorks

Team

Inside Out Agile Transformation

Automated Deployment!Common backlog!Collective ownership

Pair Programming!TDD!Continuous build, integration!Automated Deployment!Effective feedback mechanism!Tech debts / bug bashes!

Distributed Standups!Common tool for backlog

Global Web Transformation Program at a glance

Top Mgmt.PMORegion

Region

Region

RegionDelivery

UX/UI Delivery

Delivery

Data Center

Region

Content

Support

Region

The Flight Map

* indicative

Let me ask you few questions?

How many are you are certified?

How many of you have used any of the scale frameworks?

Can you tell me, what are some of the aspects / elements missing in this story, that the Frameworks and Certifications prescribe as ‘must-have’ or ‘should-have’?

No HIP - yes, you’re right… !

NO HIP

No Fancy titles and roles

No separate Release Management, Product Management, etc required

UX needs to be one of the agile teams or spread across teams

Why Kanban only at Portfolio / Epic level?

Sorry DAD, I don’t agree with you :-)

Why I think, Certifications alone don’t help you…

Some Good things I like…• Architecture continuous evolves - you got it right Dean…

• Continuous integration and test first - Again Big +1

• Trying to give a common structure to the learnings

• Somebody has put in a lot of effort to put together all their learnings and gave a structure to it

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools !

Working software over comprehensive documentation !

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation !

Responding to change over following a plan

And then the Agile Manifesto says…

I’d to agree with Ken Schwaber - The RUP guys were back!! :-)

The 4 Questions you should ask? - Alistair Cockburn• Independent of anything else going on, how will you increase collaboration?

• Accounting for everything else going on, how can you increase trial and actual deliveries to consumers?

• How will you get people to pause and reflect on what's happening to and around them?

• What are some experiments your people will do at different levels in the organisation to make a small improvement?

The Take Aways…• Need a strong executive sponsor from client organisation

• If not all, need at least one PMO member supporting the transformation

• Start with a core team (Inside Out approach) that truly believes in agile

• if the team has some or good exposure around agile, you couldn’t ask for more :-)

• Please understand, the transformation is not about introducing new vocabulary or shaking the existing structure

• The key to success lies in behavioural change

• If you want to focus on process change and improvement, focus primarily on Engineering Processes and not only operational processes

Thoughts / Comments / Questions?

THANK YOU