07-Feb: ALN-Blore- Agile sharings from Allcatel Lucent

07-Feb: ALN-Blore- Agile sharings from Allcatel Lucent / Valtech

ALN-Bangalore - Agile Leadership Network's Bangalore body had conducted a workshop on Agile Change Management sharings from Allcatel Lucent & Valtech, on two different topics which were quite intresting

[Agile Leadership Network's Bangalore  - Represented by companies like Symphony, Yahoo, Valtech, Allcatel Lucent, HCL & Citrix to a cause popularise/enable Agile in Industry & Academia]

Session1: Topic: “Organizational Change Management to Agile”

Speaker : Murthy SN Bhamidi- Director in the Wireless Division of Alcatel-Lucent India

 Gist of learings;

1. Agile Practices Implemented - Scrum, TDD(Automated Testing) & Continuous Integration along with Lean and Leadrship Agility

2. Change Management Largely brought about with below aspects

A. Energising people/team

•  Having a shared Vision - Every new program/scrum team- 2 days of vision'g exercise
• Org Structure modelled along Customer Deliverable Programs
• C Minus - Go near to customer- Co-Creation Model with telecom providers
• Technical Ladder for engineers in new culture
• Co-creation: In the areas where they could showcase a highly innovative idea like Light Radio, withhuge customer interest. To leverage that customer interest they proposed co-creation models with select customers, and instituted a working model where some of the technical folks (architects etc.) in ALU co-work with their counterparts in the customer organization, mainly to (a) validate the road-map, requirements and direction on a continuous basis (b) to update the customers on the progress by giving them key milestone sprint demos etc.
  Above approach is different from earlier model of few front end (PLM) folks collecting requirements from customer and passing them on to the development teams through N number of intermediaries.

B. Leadership Agility

• Adaptive Planning - Balance between new oppur/servicing old customers, Startegy communication, Business Values & Risk Assessment
• Attitude of Management w.r.t Agile Sensitization - Release Cadencse (R X.Quarter)
• Lean Feature Driven Development also implemented
• Feature paradigm is important to deliver an agreed up value to the customer through successful delivery of a single feature with all the focus that is required, independent of other activities that are going on. By having one single person designated as a Feature Lead/prime could establish a clear accountability for the success and failure of an individual feature delivery. Extending this further, if an we can have a small well bonded cohesive team whose charter is also aligned to deliver single feature (or related set of features) for sure our chances of success will improve dramatically.
  Historically concept of Feature Lead who had the key responsibility of tying all dependent parts together to deliver a feature successfully. During this period the teams are structured mostly on functional area basis (call Processing, Platform etc.), and each team was limiting their role to deliver their part of the solution, and not necessarily the E2E feature.
  During agile transformation, moved away from functional area teams, and formed Program/domain based cross functional teams that are aligned to customer deliverable areas - Like Transport, Smart phone etc.
  If a single big feature is being developed by multiple scrum teams, then one of the Product owners will also take the responsibility of being the Feature owner, so that he/she can coordinate the scrum of scrum requirements and ensure E2E delivery of the feature to the customer.
  This paradigm establishes clear accountability, ensures that nothing falls through the cracks, overall quality of the feature is good, and the response time to issues related to the feature is quick. Above advantages should lead to overall cycle time improvement in terms of customer acceptance of the feature.

C. Technical Agility (Overcome Agile Challenges)

•  Continuous Integration - Build of > 2days reduced to hours.
• Test Automation - @ Unit Level - achieved 100%, other levels in progress but challenging.
• Automation - Scrum to Zero Tool, other through homegrown solutions 

Session2: Topic : Agile Innovation Game

Facilitators : Team Valtech India Systems Pvt Ltd

Luke Hohmann @ creator of innovative games - more at http://innovationgames.com/

Learning Business Strategies through Innovative Games, a exercise for case study of a business scenario to be represented pictorially and solutions sought from the participants.... intresting but personally think might need more study /examples in using for Change Mgmt in Technical Environment.

Thanks to ALN Bangalore for the initiative was quite informative.

CONFLUENCE OF AGILE METHODS- A JOURNEY
Reference: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/08tn003.cfm


1. Agile Manifesto (2001) - Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Alistair Cockburn, Jim Highsmith, Bob Martin, Mike Beedle, Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland group of leaders who represented the most successful of the new lightweight methods met.

• Authored the Manifesto for Agile Software Development [ (C) 2001, the above authors this declaration may be freely copied in any form, but only in its entirety through this notice]

2. Agile Alliance (Non Profit Organisation) -Mary Poppendieck & others, branched from Agile Manifesto.

• Organising Agile Conference in US yearly to encourage the adoption of Agile Methods.
• Support those who explore and apply Agile principles and practices to make the software industry productive, humane, and sustainable

3. Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN- Non Profit Organisation-2005) - Jim Highsmith & Alstair Cockburn gathered a similar group of early Agile adopters, including David Anderson, Mike Cohn, Todd Little, and others.

• Established the six management principles known as the Project Management Declairation of Inderdependence (PMDoI) [©2005 David Anderson, Sanjiv Augustine, Christopher Avery, Alistair Cockburn, Mike Cohn, Doug DeCarlo, Donna Fitzgerald, Jim Highsmith, Ole Jepsen, Lowell Lindstrom, Todd Little, Kent McDonald, Pollyanna Pixton, Preston Smith and Robert Wysocki.] to encouraging better leadership and management in the IT sector
and software engineering profession.

 Level 4 Behaviours using Agile/Lean (Kanban)

1. David Anderson has achieved predictability in sustaining engineering at Corbis with a release every two weeks, but the content of the release is not bound until five days prior to release due to the unpredictable nature and dynamic character of the work scope. (Corbis - Microsoft Corp)

Kanban in Action @ Corbis - Quote"kanban system allows us to deliver on 3 elements of my recipe for success: reduce work-in-progress (in fact it limits it completely); balance capacity against demand (as new CRs can only be introduced when a kanban card frees up after a release); and prioritize. We hold a business prioritization meeting once per week with vice presidents from around the company. They get to pick new CRs from the backlog to allocate against free kanban cards. This forces them to think about the one, two, or three most important things for them to get done now. It forces prioritization."

Sixth Month Review @Corbis -  Results speak for themselves, quote

1. 13 software release to production in 6 months

2. Average of a release to production every 9.5 business days

3. Zero escaped defects since 6 months

The challenge now is to take our success with software maintenance and apply it to major projects in our portfolio.

Corbis Published reults of KANBAN

 

2. High Maturity Agile Team: Sky in London - Sky satellite broadcasting being run by Simon Baker and Gus Power. Quote" Gus was all apologetic about how they hadn’t yet matured to provide the financial metrics to show return on investment against features developed like I describe in my book. The truth is I’ve never seen a team that could do it consistently. At Corbis we were only partially capable of relating cost and investment to realized value in the market."

Percieved Quality Score(PQS)

Percieved Quality Score(PQS) - It is a objective evaluation of perception of customers / consumers through surveys, specific to that domain, by which you understand the Percieved Quality of that product in the market place.

For eg:
1. In the US Automotive Industry, ALG (Automotive Lease Guide) is one such company which generate the PQS across multiple automotive brands based on survey.
For detailed methodology read on at : https://www.alg.com/pdf/pqs_luxury_models.pdf



2. Similarly in a Educational Domain, you could see how this is measured.

reference- http://www.ou.nl/Docs/Campagnes/ICDE2009/Papers/Final_paper_243wessa.pdf
Use of the Engg Model as illustrated in the above paper.
An illustration of the usefulness of the Engineering Model approach is given by the following
quote: “Females who report a high number of submitted feedback messages have
significantly lower exam scores. On the other hand, male students who exaggerate their
efforts are not in danger of having lower exam scores. This implies that the female
exaggeration bias is small but harmful - the male exaggeration bias is big and harmless. ”
(Wessa 2009c). This result provides valuable information that allows us to make significant
improvements in the statistical learning environment. For instance, female students who tend
to exaggerate their own performance should receive accurate and timely feedback about
their real performance (as compared to other students) based on objective measures. This
form of critical (self) assessment and reflection about student's actual learning efforts should
be made an integral part of the statistical learning environment.

5 Myths about Quality

(Ref: Quality is free - Phil Crosby)

1. First erroneous assmption is that quality means goodness or luxury or shineness or weight.
Always define the context of usage of word 'Quality'. Quality - Conformance to Requirements.

2. Second erroneous assumption is that quality is an intangible and therefore not measurable.
Quality is measured by the cost of quality, which is the expense of non conformance - the cost of doing things wrong.

3. Third erroneous assumption is that there is an "economics" of quality.
The most offered excuse by managers to have done nothing is that "their business is different"and that the economics of quality won't allow them doing anything.

4.The fourth assumption that causes problems is the one that says that all problems of quality are originated by the workers, particularly those in the manufacturing area.

Personal Observation: Although the above statement may be true to software where generally most of the problems originate in the Engineering Areas.

5. The fifth erroneous assumption is that quality originates in the quality department.
Most Quality professionals feel that they are responsible for quality in their company, so this assumption is really entrenched.

Quality & Sex - Words , What is common ??

(Ref: Quality is free - Phil Crosby

Objective: Define the context of usage of word Quality.

Myths:
* Everyone is for it (Of course, under certain conditions)
* Everyone feels they understand it (Even though they would'nt want to explain it)
* Everyone thinks execution is only a matter of following natural inclinations. (we do get along somehow)
* Most people feel that all problems in these areas are caused by other people.

Conclusion: It is difficult to have a meaningful, real-life, factual discussion on sex, quality or other complicated subjects until some basic errorneous assumptions are examined and altered.