Lessons learned - Agile Adoption workshops
The issue:
My client is an established company with well defined waterfall/PRINCE2 project management methodology needs help to move towards a more agile approach to delivery benefits faster.
Their IT division have adopted Scrum development practices and there is a danger that the project managers are going to become irrelevant as projects are being driven by Product Owners and Scrum Teams, self organising their work from the business requirements produced by the Product Owner.
I had just delivered a webinar on the subject of Waterfall to Agile so was able to put into practice the issues I covered on the webinar. Some of the staff had even been on my Agile Project Management course so were able to better relate to the challenges facing them.
The Approach:
Delivery of a tailored workshop that explains all flavours of Agile eg AgilePM from DSDM Consortium, Scrum from Scrum Alliance and Lean Kanban from Lean Kanban University.
The Details:
Explain the project life cycle, showcasing how project managers have a real value in ensuring that the project is commercially viable and aligns to the wider context of the organisation. Demonstrate where Scrum development practices fit into the life cycle, making it clear that whilst Scrum is great for development it doesn’t include activities for ensuring successful implementation or deployment of what is being developed.
The Conclusion:
Agile project management can only be effective if agile development (usually through Scrum) is partnered with effective management of change. As project teams we need to get really good at helping our customers deploy what we are creating.
LESSONS LEARNED
1. We need to provide guidance on how to practically support implementations:
- Rewriting product and service guides
- Teaching sales teams how the new products and services work
- Incorporating the maintenance and support of new products and services into help desk and call centre scripts
2. We need to encourage people to want to use our new products and services :
- Explaining the benefits, showcasing the improvements from what existed before
- Provide lots of opportunities to practice using the new products and services
- Establish user groups so people can help each other get used to new products and services.
Agile is all about
- Deliver early
- Deliver frequently
- Deliver on time
- Deliver real business benefits
Deployment vs development?
If we don’t put as much effort into agile deployment as we do into agile development then are users will not less us deploy frequently — they will want to minimise the pain of transitioning from one system to another by waiting until everything has been developed. So our users and our customers will keep us in a waterfall world unless we help them.
