Category: Enterprise

In a 30-day period, Senex Rex motivated and shepherded a 700-person company, with development teams in 4 countries, to convert from waterfall to Scrum, with two training courses, one in the USA and the other in India. Today Dan Greening watched the CTO answer employee questions perfectly in front of 68 Indian, Ukrainian and British staff members, saying that there were three roles, Scrum Master, Product Owner and Team Member, that the distinction between QA and Dev would be erased, that there would be dedicated Scrum Masters, that bonuses would be tied to team success, not individual contribution, that they will be using Scrum, and there are no alternatives.

This approach will turn this privately held startup company into an unstoppable machine, and likely prepare it for a highly successful IPO.

Senex Rex leaves companies with the skills and training materials to coach and train their own people in Scrum and agile methods. We help companies design career paths and compensation plans to support agile practices and management behavior long-term. We do not use the “army of coaches” model, but rather help shape companies to permanently self-sustain. The clarity in what executives say following our training is dramatically different from what we’ve seen with other approaches.

Sometimes, looking at the bigger picture of workflow can highlight traditional bottlenecks. Duplicating code for the sake of expediency is one of the symptoms of eroding agility. Removing interdepartmental barriers will bring greater agility to an organization.

In this first of 5 articles, Dan Greening makes a strong case for doing software modification tasks in a virtual laptop environment and automating regression testing into systems accessible to all departments affected by those changes. Please continue reading at http://agilecanon.wpengine.com/five-challenges-that-force-agility/

Shortening the time between releases can have the effect of increasing agility throughout an enterprise. In this article, the author recounts his experience at Citrix Online, and the positive ripple effects Agile techniques brought to the company.

In many companies, agile software development is misunderstood and misreported, causing taxation increases, higher volatility in Profit and Loss (P&L) statements and manual tracking of programmer hours. One large company’s confused finance department expenses all agile software development and capitalizes waterfall development; projects in this company that go agile see their headcounts cut by 50%. This discourages projects from going agile.

Scrum’s production experiment framework can align well with the principles of financial reporting. In this article, the author explains the basics of capitalization and expensing, and offers a financial framework for capitalizing agile projects that can be understood by both accountants and agile teams.

Question

Devesh Kumar from Thomson Reuters asks:
I am being asked to setup agile in totality. I know to setup agile development teams. What I don’t know is how to handle Agile budgeting, How to migrate VPs to agile in higher management, what must change in HR to support agile, and what other organizational policies must change. Can you help?

Answer

You raise some complicated issues, and different people will have different experiences that can help. I bet you have been inundated with private emails, offering consulting help. I’ll just spew this stuff publicly.

As a company, we sustainably adopt continuous-improvement techniques (iterate, measure, reflect, and adapt) everywhere to rapidly identify market need, explore demand, establish product plans, deliver products and delight customers, and support employees, so we gain greater profitability indefinitely.

Dan Greening explores the challenges of scaling Agile and Scrum concepts beyond the team level to project portfolios with executive involvement. Along the way, he discusses forecasting beyond sprints, commitments vs. lies, dashboard heresy, waterfall compatibility and failing safely, among other thought-provoking ideas. [Part 3: 26 min.]. Interview by Dave Prior at ProjectsAtWork.