Q5 - Chris Fry

Q5: So, what approach did you take to the rollout?  Did you get help?  And how long did it take?

Initially we planned on doing a few teams, one at a time, and learning from our mistakes.   After talking it over with our R&D leaders we decided that the commitment to the change and the need were great enough to justify an "all in" approach and decided to move the entire organization to one methodology.  Mike Cohn has written about the "all in" pattern here http://www.agilejournal.com/articles/articles/patterns-of-agile-adoption.html

Some of the advantages of the all in pattern are: 1)  Management demonstrates commitment to the new model; 2) The transition is quick; 3) There is no time where you are supporting two styles of work, everyone is committed to the change; 4) You deliver value early and are able to demonstrate it to the organization and the customer base; 5) It reduces the risk of one team working in a waterfall approach; 6) You are able compare teams going through the transition at the same time.  There are some drawbacks but it’s a great model when it works, as it did for us.

We did get help.   Mike Cohn gave us great advice when he said the "all in" approach would cost us more.  We got a lot of help from Pete Behrens who organized agile coaches for us and gave us great help throughout the transition (see http://trailridgeconsulting.com/blog/?p=96 ).   We sent Scrum Masters to certification and had Mike Cohn run in-house training for our Product Owners.  All the training we invested in really helped smooth the bumps for the organization.   

It took us 3 months to transition the entire team to agile releases.   Change is never done, I would say we are still constantly improving, learning from our mistakes, and introducing new agile techniques each month.