Darwin, Agile and the Dinosaurs: considerations when evolving Agile to Enterprise Level. Agile Purists and Enterprise Agile practitioners are always debating how Scrum roles, ceremonies and practices should be implemented when dealing with highly complex Enterprise environments and solutions. Can a single Product Owner cope with the complexity? How do we scale Agile? Do we need Architectural leadership? Let’s look at these topics together.

1. George Anghelache
Cristian Cazan
October 2012
Darwin, Agile and
the Dinosaurs

2. IN YOUR ZONE 2
Endava is a leading IT services organization, with offices in London
and New York and delivery centers in Romania and Moldova that
support the full project lifecycle. Utilizing our distributed agile
delivery model - TEAM, we are able to deliver significant
improvements to quality and productivity resulting in our clients
being able to deliver substantially more for the same budget.
Introductions

3. IN YOUR ZONE 3
Delivery Manager
• 15+ years experience in IT
• Former Projects Delivery Manager and
Head of PM, overseen good delivery of all
Endava projects from a RO base
• Agile Expert, consulting blue-chip clients in
implementing nearshore distributed agile
Delivery Manager
• 15+ years experience in IT
• Former Head of Development Romania,
spotting, attracting and managing over 160 IT
professionals in 2 delivery locations
• Agile Expert, Certified Scrum Master, wide
consultancy experience in enterprise agile
George Anghelache Cristian Cazan
Introductions

4. IN YOUR ZONE 4
Darwin, Agile and the Dinosaurs
considerations when evolving Agile to Enterprise Level
Agile Purists and Enterprise Agile practitioners are
always debating how Scrum roles, ceremonies and
practices should be implemented when dealing with
highly complex Enterprise environments and
solutions.
Can a single Product Owner cope with the
complexity? How do we scale Agile? Do we need
Architectural leadership?
Let’s look at these topics together.

5. IN YOUR ZONE
Raise your hand if …
•You’ve tried Agile on this type of project
•5-15 teams
•Multi-site teams
•Multiple vendors
•Large and complex systems
Any others ?

6. IN YOUR ZONE
What does Complex Enterprise Environment mean?
•Large organizations
•Complex integrated business critical systems
•Multiple vendors to develop their systems
•Mix of technologies
•Very complex budgeting cycle
•Intricate organization structure and stakeholder tree to
manage
•Large programs of work
•Long history => inherited a good amount of antiquated
delivery practices

7. IN YOUR ZONE
What does The Book say?
•maximizing the value of the product
•maximizing the work of the Development Team
•the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog
• Clearly expressing Product Backlog items
• Ordering the items in the Product Backlog to best achieve goals and missions
• Ensuring that the Product Backlog is visible, transparent, and clear to all stakeholders, and
shows what the Scrum Team will work on next
• Ensuring the Development Team understands items in the Product Backlog to the level
needed
Product Owner as Defined in Scrum
7
?

8. IN YOUR ZONE
Hmm… will it work at Enterprise Level?
One Man Band One Stressed CookieThe Hero
8

9. IN YOUR ZONE 9
•Focus the will of many business users into detailed US
•Get buy-in of very large stakeholder tree
•Work around complex budgeting and tracking mechanics
Enterprise Agile Challenge
What would be an
Evolution of the Product Owner
in a complex enterprise context?

10. IN YOUR ZONE
The Composite Product Owner
Product
Owner
Business
Analyst
Project
Manager
10
We need a evolution of the concept at Enterprise Level
Complexity
Decouple three main areas:
strategy / features / management

11. IN YOUR ZONE 11
•Focus on building the features
•Removing impediments in a complex client environment
•Channel results and reporting under contractual terms
Enterprise Agile Challenge
What would be an
Evolution of the Scrum Master
in a complex enterprise context?

12. IN YOUR ZONE
Composite Scrum Master
12
Scrum
Master
Project
Manager
features and scrum team
enterprise planning and
communication

13. IN YOUR ZONE 13
• Complex integrated business critical systems creating lots of dependencies
• Mix of technologies as multiple vendors have & are developing the systems
via large programs of work
• Intricate organization structure and stakeholder tree to manage
Enterprise Agile Challenge
What would be an
Evolution of the Agile Scaling
in a complex enterprise context?

14. IN YOUR ZONE
Scrum of Scrums, caveats with growth?
Project coordination
Release Planning
Scrums coordination
Tech leadership
Solution storming
•The SoS will have an overload to lead all the teams and projects
•Keeping up to date will require too many meetings, too many details
•Effective acting as Tech Leadership and Future Team compromised
•LIMIT @3-4 SCRUMS and 30-odd people
Scrum coordination
Plan ownership
User Story ownership
Quality
14
Add more teams


15. IN YOUR ZONE
Enabling Enterprise Scale Agile
• Growing to a large number of teams requires a change of the standard structure
• Vertical ownership: each Cluster and each Scrum = Feature focus
• Scale Horizontally by creating new clusters containing 3-4 Scrum teams
• Each Cluster has a project manager to focus on: Release Planning, Reporting and Impediments
• Horizontal ownership: the shared Design Scrum = Technical Knowledge and Quality focus
Virtual Scrum of Scrums of Scrums: DS SM, PMs, SMs, Agile Coaches
Cluster of teams Cluster of teamsDesign Scrum (DS)
Technical Knowledge & Quality focus via DS shared allocation
Featurefocus.Detail
Add more team clusters; Multisite enabled
15

16. IN YOUR ZONE 16
• Complex domain knowledge spanning many integrated business critical
systems
• Significant mix of technologies, frameworks, 3rd party product, COTS
• Various technical and subject matter expert groups to assimilate
knowledge from
Enterprise Agile Challenge
How would you approach
Growing multiple scrum teams
in a complex enterprise context?

17. IN YOUR ZONE
How do you ramp-up Highly Productive Teams?
17
• Organic growth, seeding and pairing techniques to ramp-up and build highly productive teams
• Use pairing to accelerate domain knowledge transfer, new members ramp-up and improve code quality
Initial Core
Team
Team 1
Team 2
+
+
Team 3
Team 4
Team 5
Team 6
+
+
Project Lifecycle

18. IN YOUR ZONE 18
• Intricate flux of requirements to backlog items through many layers of
business users, key stakeholders, compliance agents and composite product
owner
• Insuring strategic architecture and design principles alignment with
empowered technical groups from the client
Enterprise Agile Challenge
How would you evolve
Planning activities
in a complex enterprise context?

19. IN YOUR ZONE
Forward Planning
19
Client
Sprint 1
Build
Sprint 2
Build
…
Build
Sprint 6
Build
Sprint 7
H.U.T.
Release planning
What’s to be build?
Design Authority
Technical experts
How we build it?
Composite
Product Owner
Now Team
 Planning
 Look ahead
 Foresee impediments
Future Team
SMsDesign Leads

20. IN YOUR ZONE
•Chuck Norris is ScrumMaster and ProductOwner –
simultaneously
•Chuck Norris has implemented everything at the planning
meeting
•When Chuck Norris says “done”, then it’s “done”
•Chuck Norris answers just two questions on the stand-up
meeting: Chuck Norris does not know obstacles
•Chuck Norris does not need Reviews or Retrospectives:
there is no improvement for Chuck Norris’ process
•Chuck doesn't meet customer requirements and
needs, they meet his!
The Anti Hero
20

21. IN YOUR ZONE
Thank you!
Cristian Cazan
Delivery Manager
Cristian.Cazan@endava.com
George Anghelache
Delivery Manager
George.Anghelache@endava.com

22. IN YOUR ZONE
This material draws inspiration from a massive community of Agile enthusiasts, our own experience and that of many clients and
companies we've engaged with through the years.
• People that have inspired us through many trainings, workshops , articles and webinars: Mike Cohn, Jeff Sutherland, Henrik
Kniberg, Ken Schwaber, Roman Pichler, Anna Forss, Serge Beaumont, Mike Beedle and many others we’ve not intentionally forgot
• Sites and whitepapers with excellent knowledge: www.agilealliance.org; www.mountaingoatsoftware.com;
www.scrumalliance.org; www.controlchaos.com; www.implementingscrum.com; www.jeffsutherland.org; www.agileforall.com;
www.infoq.com; www.rapidscrum.com; www.slideshare.net; www.agile42.com; scrum.jeffsutherland.com;
www.agilemanifesto.org; www.scrum.org; www.wikipedia.org; www.projectmanagement.com; www.romanpichler.com;
www.agilesherpa.org; www.cathycarleton.com; www.implementingscrum.com; www.gantthead.com;
• Books that have added invaluable knowledge: Ken Schwaber - Agile Project Management with Scrum; Mike Cohn - Agile
Estimating and Planning; Mike Cohn – Introduction to user stories; Roman Pichler - Agile product management with Scrum;
Anna Forss - Confessions of a serial product owner; Ken Schwaber - The Enterprise and Scrum; Mike Cohn - User Stories Applied;
Carl Larson and Frank LaFasto - Teamwork; Serge Beaumont - Practical Tools for the Product Owner: Focus, Value, Flow; Jim
Highsmith - Agile Project Management; Jeff Patton - Story Maps; Mike Cohn - Succeeding with Agile; 37 Signals: Getting Real; Jeff
Sutherland - The Power of Scrum ; Tobias Mayer - Scrum Roles; Donald Reinertsen - The Principles of Product Development
Flow; C. Jakobsen and J. Sutherland - Scrum and CMMI – Going from Good to Great; Donald Reinertsen - Managing The Design
Factory; Scrum Sense – What every product owner should know; Ken Schwaber, Beedle Mike - Agile Software Development with
Scrum;
• Pictures copyright and courtesy of The Flistones, Warner Bros; Television Distribution & Meet the Robinsons, Disney Pictures
Attributions