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.
