A New Flavor of Agile

Rediscovering and implementing Agile’s rootsAgile across the business

Andrew HsuProduct Manager at Vega Factor

March 12, 2017

● Typical Agile

● Our tweaks

● Current challenges

● Ideas to try

Contents

Typical Agile

Typical Agile work cycle

● Problem(s)

● Break it down - sprints & features

● Estimate

● Prioritize

● Adapt daily

● Rinse & repeat

Issues

● Engineering team focused○ Lack of business collaboration

● Lack of timeline discussions

● Highly optimized leaves○ Hard to drive innovation or large changes

Upon further investigation

● Agile creators had it figured out○ http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

● Many Agile articles overly focus on optimizing engineering teams

● How do we optimize Agile for the business as a whole?

http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

Our tweaks

Implementation

● Team structure

● Solving problems together

● Estimation

● Weekly routines

● Retrospectives

“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”

Team structure • Solving problems together • Estimation • Weekly routines • Retrospectives

Product Platform

Business POD

Engineering POD

Module 1 PODAPE

Module 2 PODAPE

Module 3 PODAPE

Marketing POD

Product POD



“Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.”

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

“Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.”


Rules of thumb

● List of needs (in consensus)● Product writes out requirements● Drive discussion with engineering● What’s the minimum we can build for an effective test & to deliver value● Discuss time vs. business value● Summarize what will be achieved in 2 weeks● Pressure test with all parties


“The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a

development team is face-to-face conversation.”


Staging cut weeks


PrioritizationAPE work + stories into Pivotal

POD Retro

M

T

W

Th

F

Production cut weeks

PrioritizationPOD estimation

POD Problem solving, planning, prioritization meeting

M

T

W

Th

F

“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its

behavior accordingly.”


Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.


Current challenges

Current challenges

● Electronic tools per POD○ Planning, communication, documentation○ Getting people on the same mediums

● Duping of feature tickets across trackers & different altitudes of each ticket

● Meeting routines○ Right people in the right meetings○ Efficient topic time allocation at meetings

● Internalize our new structures and routines○ I’m in 5 pods

Ideas to try

Ideas to try

I hope something in this presentation helps make Agile more inclusive and effective for you.

● Get cross functional - form a POD or facilitate new conversations● Drive consensus - for one feature, pressure test it across departments● Set up a retro● Set up a weekly routine for improvement

Thanks!

[email protected]

A New Flavor of Agile

Business

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