6. What is it? Why Agile?
Agile
Manifesto
Take Away
Program for today
What is it? Why Agile? Agile Manifesto Take Away
7. What is agile?
Kanban Scrum Lean
Agile Project Management SAFe
What is it? Why Agile? Agile Manifesto Take Away
8. Short development
periods
What is agile?
Direct communication Self-directed teams
of motivated individuals
Fixed time, cost & quality Transparency
What is it? Why Agile? Agile Manifesto Take Away
Customer or Business Value
10. Agile Manifesto
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
The items to the right are valuable, but we believe the items to the left are more important.
What is it? Why Agile? Agile Manifesto Take Away
11. What is it? Why Agile? Agile Manifesto Take Away
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
13. Working services over comprehensive documentation
What is it? Why Agile? Agile Manifesto Take Away
14. Working services over comprehensive documentation
First
time use
What is it? Why Agile? Agile Manifesto Take Away
15. 24x7 support
1x/month SLA reports
Response within 30min – 99.9%
Print quality: Good
€ € €
Initial response just an
acknoledgement
Customer satisfaction 6,5
9x5 support
No SLA reports
Print quality: Good
€ € €
Initial response is the issue
resolution
Customer satisfaction 9,0
Company BCompany A
Customer collaboration over contract negotiations
What is it? Why Agile? Agile Manifesto Take Away
20. Responding to change over following a plan
• Change
• Different way of working
• Attitude and behaviour
• Not easy
What is it? Why Agile? Agile Manifesto Take Away
21. Responding to change over following a plan
• Iterative (step by step)
• Quick learning process
• Together with the customer
• Different expertises
What is it? Why Agile? Agile Manifesto Take Away
22. Agile Service Excellence
Individuals and interactions inspiring and motivating people
Working services to quickly get the customer started
Customer collaboration only do what your customer really needs
Responding to change to stay relevant
What is it? Why Agile? Agile Manifesto Take Away
Today’s journey starts back in the industrial revolution – when individuals such as Henry Ford realised the need of maximising the production of goods in order to help improve the quality of people’s life by making the product accessible to the masses.
Somewhere along the line companies focused on maximising the production and they forgot of one of the key elements that formed part of this process. The workers interaction was limited to the tasks they did. This was in order to produce more in less time, they were limited to the job they did and only that without a broad vision. This then compromised in certain cases the quality of the end product delivered.
When a poorly made product came off the production line, a company faced two undesirable options. It could scrap the piece- having resources, time and financial impact or it could ship a poor quality product.
Industrial experts such as Deming, taught Japan’s manufacturers how to produce top quality products economically. The objective is to continually progress through each stage while aiming to achieve a better quality output of products or services or information as defined by our customers.
Quality is the base of this principle– Time reduction, less impact to change, transparency of current situation.
But what happens when the customer’s demands and expectations move quicker than what we can cope with?
The world around us is changing rapidly and that change IS DRIVEN BY TECHNOLOGY. Clients have different options regarding methods of contact with those they do business with, businesses that must have HIGH AVAILABILITY and provide RELEVANT, the 1ST class PERSONAL SERVICE.
Digital innovators such as Spotify and Netflix are at the full front of such developments when it comes to tailoring their services to client needs. They have a clear concept of corporate culture and a defined approach to collaboration processes. They believe firmly in a methodology called AGILE
NEW WAYS OF WORKING TOGETHER, NEW WAY OF SERVICING CLIENTS.
Agile is no longer a trend, it is the new status quo for IT departments that build or develop. The organizations around these departments are increasingly IT-driven and follow IT in using agile methods. In a quickly changing economy and facing increasingly complex IT-infrastructures, organizations need to be agile to survive.
Agile methods are increasingly adopted outside of IT and becomes the standard in entire companies. This development has been going on for some time and we (and analysts, check Forrester & Gartner) see it is here to stay.
As a logical consequence of the expansion of agile methods, we expect more service departments to adopt some form of agile in the coming years.
We have heard this terms in the past…
Kanban -visual system for managing work as it moves through a process. It visualizes both the process and the actual work passing through that process.
Scrum - Regular management of customer expectations, anticipated results, flexibility and adaptation, return on investment, risk mitigation, productivity and quality, alignment between client and team, and ultimately motivated team.
Lean - eliminate/reduce non-value-added activities (termed "wastes") and thus increase customer value.
Agile Project Management - is an iterative process that focuses on customer value first, team interaction over tasks, and adapting to current business reality rather than following a prescribed plan
Scaled Agile Framework -
These are all agile
While each of the agile methodologies is unique in its specific approach, they all share a common vision and core values (The Agile Manifesto). They all fundamentally incorporate iteration and the continuous feedback that it provides to successively refine and deliver a software system.
They all involve continuous planning, continuous testing, continuous integration, and other forms of continuous evolution of both the project and the software. Agile methods focus on empowering people to collaborate and make decisions together quickly and effectively.
Shared concepts of Agile methods: - translation of the manifesto
Short development methods
Sprints / iterations
2-4 weeks in Scrum, Xtreme programming shorter, AgilePM longer
Daily standup
Shippable product
Means of risk management & feedback
Direct communication
Face to face
Team works in one room
Working with the customer, part of the team
Self-directed teams of motivated individuals
No one will tell you HOW to do it
Customer / Product owner will prioritize wishes
Team decides on the work they pick up
Continuous improvement, retrospective, attention for people
Fixed time, cost & quality
Holds true for project management and development
Transparency
Visualizing your work
Kanban
Open backlog
Product reviews or similar
Customer Value
Agile is a time boxed, iterative approach to software delivery that builds software incrementally from the start of the project, instead of trying to deliver it all at once near the end. It is an umbrella term for several iterative and incremental software development methodologies.
It works by breaking projects down into little bits of user functionality called user stories, prioritizing them, and then continuously delivering them in short two week cycles called iterations.
Drive down risk:
Agile teams work in tiny increments of functionality, not huge features. This allows them to have working software ready and in a usable state earlier on. This means that the software can be used while it is being developed.
Because software is usable so soon, features are assessed sooner. The Customer can see immediately if they are really as useful as he expected. Corrective steering is possible. There is a greatly reduced risk of building the wrong thing, or a gold-plated excess of the right thing.
Short time to market
Operational awareness:
Agile teams keep their work-in-progress to a minimum, and track their progress on visible charts and the Kanban wall. One can walk into the group work area and tell what tasks are in progress and how close they are to being completed. You can glance at how close the team is to completing some critical functionality. It is an orderly and visible work system.
Customer involvement:
Agile methods put the customer in the drivers' seat. Customers choose which bit of functionality comes next, and when a feature is complete enough for their needs. Agile is intentionally customer-intimate, so customers and developers (including testers, tech writing, and customers) are on the same team. It is a strong alternative to an adversarial relationship
So now that we understand the WHY and we have bought the idea, lets explore the values that united teams to adopt agile as their working method….
Based on agile manifesto, applied to services
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Have you ever been in a situation were you are trying to achieve the simplest of tasks and this happens?
How tiring is it to what to achieve something or come with a problem and have to go through a LONG crazy process to get response back
Instead of front and back office teams as solution groups, why not create solution groups for a set of services? Why not have different expertises in these teams?
Holiday example.
Remember there is a human being behind the service you are delivering. To truly achieve customer excellence there must be a balance between the documentation we keep and how quickly we respond to people’s inmediate needs.
Delivering improvements instead of very detailed state of the art documentation
Getting things done
Adjust to business needs otherwise you might loose customers. They might start looking elsewhere. For example if you dont deliver highly accessible document storage solutions, they could downloading apps/getting their own stuff to get things done, which introduces as we know security risks i.e. Uploading things to the cloud.
Supplier A is available 99% of the time versus
Supplier B is available 80% of the time
What is it that you are interested in? Getting a resolution or having an automated response in the first seconds of logging the issue.
You might be interested more in the customer satisfaction aspect which is in the contract.
Working with the customer over contract negotiations
Green on the outside but red on the inside (Customer not happy)
Stick to the rules over collaborating with your customer
I often hear that we as supporting department/organisation take the customer’s position and say that we know what the customer wants. But you can ask you customer a lot of questions that will help you, think for instance of what would have the highest priority.
Cantine example.
Keeping relevant to customer needs. Tastes are always changing so you want to keep the menu interesting.
Waterfall model developments, IT projects that go over budget, IT projects that deliver something that doesn’t fit the customer’s wishes. We all know the examples, even if hasn’t happened in your own organisations you can read it in the newspapers.
IT projects that last for years don’t do what it is needed and get scrapped anyways
The Agile Manifesto doesn’t describe seperate points with seperate solutions. It’s a big change and to be able to quickly respond to changes (the customer’s questions) you need to embrace the entire mindset.
The BEST plans could not be relevant for LONG.
Keep checking with your customers
Be willing to collaborate with different expertise
When we focus more on the left side of the manifesto
Any new services you are releasing to your customer. Include them in an early product – Have a customer panel, involve them when releasing new functionality or processes
Small releases accompanied of Iterations – Phased approached rather than big bang. Learn from your mistakes, see what you can improve on and apply it for the next phase.
Report on customer experience using feedback rating – so use XLAs and customer feedback rather than heavily focus on SLAs
SPACE is TIP – Switch context quicker to remain relevant
It would not be agile to present an entire vision so we present a product roadmap overview on trello
Continuous development
Iterating
Recognize needs
Improvements delivered every 2 weeks