When a team is ready to embark on an agile adventure, it is vital to consider the behavioral and practical aspects of agile prior to jumping in. Mario shares the important readiness factors within his “Ready, Implement, Coach, and Hone” deployment framework. This includes preparing for an agile mindset of culture change and providing insight and knowledge into the challenging decisions that should be made prior to embarking on the adventure. Readiness includes establishing an organizational vision with objectives, embracing agile principles, evaluating buy-in and willingness, considering measures of success, adapting roles and responsibilities, evaluating existing practices, building a scalable agile framework, initiating agile education, and creating a customer validation vision. Outcomes include a better understanding of what can increase your chances for true agile transformation and an Agile Transformation Roadmap to begin or enhance your journey. For those who have already embarked on agile, enhance your current agile direction by understanding readiness factors.

1. AW3
Concurrent Session
11/13/2013 10:15 AM
"Getting Ready for Your Agile
Adventure"
Presented by:
Mario Moreira
Agile Coach
Brought to you by:
340 Corporate Way, Suite 300, Orange Park, FL 32073
888 268 8770 904 278 0524 sqeinfo@sqe.com www.sqe.com

2. Mario Moreira
Agile Consultant
Mario Moreira is an agile enterprise change agent who helps organizations
with their agile transformations. A seasoned agile coach, Mario works with
large distributed organizations to small collocated teams, supporting scrum
teams, ScrumMasters, product owners, middle management, and
executives. A certified ScrumMaster and Scrum Professional, Mario has
implemented Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), and kanban practices,
focusing on business benefits that agile can bring to organizations. Mario is
the well-known author of Being Agile-Your Roadmap to Successful
Adoption of Agile, Agile for Dummies, and Adapting Configuration
Management for Agile Teams. Visit Mario’s
blog cmforagile.blogspot.com dedicated to agile adoption topics.

3. Agile Development Conference East 2013
Getting Ready for your
Agile Adventure
Mario E. Moreira
Agile/Lean Coach and Consultant – Emergn Limited
Author, Scrum Master, Enterprise Change Agent
November 13, 2013

4. Welcome!
•
•
•
•
Enterprise Agile Coach helping companies
transform to Agile. Coached over 50 teams
Writer of the Agile Adoption Roadmap Blog (at
http://cmforagile.blogspot.com/)
CSM and CSP having implemented Scrum, XP, &
Kanban at the product and organizational levels.
Author:
 Being Agile: Your Roadmap to Successful
Adoption of Agile, 2013, Apress (Springer) New!
 Agile for Dummies, 2010, Wiley and written for
CA Agile Vision Product Marketing
 Adapting Configuration Management for Agile
Teams, 2009, Wiley
 Software Configuration Management
Implementation Roadmap, 2004, Wiley
•
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

5. The Journey
• Challenges
• RICH Deployment Model
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

6. Why this session?
• Not really sure how to get started
• Little focus on the Agile culture
• Not seeing the business benefits (and outcomes)
that Agile can bring
• Not seeing enough project successes
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

7. What is Agile?
•
•
•
•
An iterative and incremental framework?
A set of practices and techniques?
A SDLC methodology or process?
A collection of tools?
Or is it…
A set of values and principles
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

8. Challenge #1
• People know more about the mechanics
(practices), then they know about the
values and principles
1. 66% could name 3 of the 4 Scrum events as
you can
2. 10% could name 3 of the 12 Agile Principles
as you can
• How well do you know the Agile Principles?
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

9. Agile Principles* - Revisit
• Satisfy Customer with
Valuable Software
• Welcoming Change to
Requirements
• Frequent/Continuous
Delivery
• Business and Development
Work Together
• Motivated Individuals who
are Trusted
• Face-to-Face
Communication
• Working Software as
Measure of Progress
• Sustainable Pace
• Technical Excellence
• Simplicity
• Self-Organizing Teams
• Reflection for
Improvement
*Abridged
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

10. Challenge #2
• Few tie Agile into their business strategy
• Agile is a thing that teams should do
• Few comprehend that Agile focuses on
building value
• Fewer realize that Agile can contribute
to an improvement of revenue
• Failed products + successful products
with unused functionality” = upwards of
a trillion dollars of lost money annually
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

11. Do you really embrace
Customer Value?
• Can you pin down Customer Value?
• Customer value
 = customer needs + right timing + right costs
• It is an elusive target that must be adapted to
continually
• Do you believe the closer you get to the
elusive customer value, the more money you
can possibly make?
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

12. What is most important?
• Keeping to a plan or adapting to customer needs?
• Cost, Schedule, or Scope?
• What happens when you bring the project in or
under the Schedule, but customer doesn’t need
buy the product?
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

13. To be a successful farmer, one
must first know the nature of
the soil
– Xenophon, Oeconomicus

14. Ready, Implement, Coach, Hone (RICH)TM
• Deployment Model for
achieving an Agile
transformation
• Primarily focused on
readiness
• Aligns with the inspectand-adapt framework
Ready
Hone
• Should be handled in an
iterative and emergent
manner
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
Implement
Coach
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

15. Readiness
• Conditioning the soil (aka, mind) prior to growing the
seeds (aka, the people)
• Focusing on the what and why
• Assessing the current environment
• Understanding the context
• Laying the groundwork of agile values and principles
• Discussing business benefits
• Gauging the willingness
• Shaping the implementation accordingly
So how do we get “ready”
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

16. Common understanding of Agile
• Agile are Values and Principles
• Myths about Agile
 No documentation, no design, no planning,
team does whatever they like, silver bullet,
undisciplined, one way, not predicable
• Explain both the adaptable yet discipline
• Common language helps with clarity and
reduces confusion
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

17. Understand the drivers for
organizational change.
Proactive
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
Trendy
Competition
Not Working
Cost
Morale
Productivity
Time-to-Market
Value
Belief
• Examine the drivers around Agile
• Is it targeted toward teams only
• Is going to Agile tied to business goals?
Reactive
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

18. Building the Agile Mindset
• Build awareness of the Agile
culture. Begin education
• Determine level of belief
• Beyond values & principles
 No one succeeds unless the
team exceeds
 Understand business value as
the driver
 While Mgt must be less
command-and-control, the
Team must be more assertive
 Team members
volunteer/commit to the work
 Shared leadership and trust
 Belief in transparency
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

19. Customers and Employees matter
• Does company vision include objectives regarding
customer and employee engagement?
• Ensuring commitment to change
• Adapting reward to customer value and self-organizing
teams
Approach
Result
Customer
Engagement
Employee
Engagement
Continuous and Adaptive
(aka, Agile)
Organizational
Objectives
Incentive
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
Increased
Sales
Increased
Productivity
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

20. Are you Suitable for Agile
• While anyone can go Agile…
Investment/Expected Growth & Revenue
 Is the work right for Agile?
 Is it worth the effort to go Agile?
Approach with Caution
More mature product doing well.
Changing culture can introduce risk
to the growth and revenue.
Go
New products
with potential for
product growth
Potential
More mature product trying to
introduce a whole new set of
functionality to increase revenue.
Stop
More mature product that has limited or shrinking
revenue and investments so may not be worth the cost
and effort for mature
Product Maturity
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

21. Executive and stakeholder buy-in.
• Understand the current level of stakeholder buy-in (or
resistance) at various levels
• Explain their role






Funding and resources
Aligning leadership around Agile
On-going communication
Helping mitigate resistance
Promote Agile objectives
Adapt language toward value
• Evaluate engagement (how willing?)
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

22. Messaging for Agile
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Communication Vision for messaging
Creating buzz
Listening to concerns
Using appropriate channels
Signaling in the new culture
Align story telling to the culture you want
Adapting rewards
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

23. Treat Agile Transformation as an initiative
If you do not manage culture, it manages you… – Edgar Schein
•
•
•
•
•
Transformation doesn’t happen in an ad hoc manner
What is the scope of your deployment?
Who are the sponsor and champions?
What is your incremental path?
What support will be provided?
• Consider an iterative approach
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

24. State of engineering and Agile
• To know where you
are, its important to
baseline
• If no Agile, baseline
engineering
practices
• Helps set the
context of where
you are in both
Agile and
engineering
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

25. Agile Framework
• What Agile method, process, practice works
for you
 Scrum, XP, Kanban, DSDM, etc…
• Look for optimization from the idea to the
delivery (e.g., covers end-to-end)
• Think about scaling elements
 Agile Release Planning, Scrum of Scrums, etc…
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

26. Determine team willingness and
capability
Capability
How capable
are team
members
in Agile
methods
Willingness
How willing
are team
members and
mgt to move
to Agile
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

27. Agile Roles and Team Organization
PM
PJM
PO
MGR
SM
PO
SM
MGR
MGR
MGR
DEV
QA
DEV
QA
DEV
TW
TW
Scrum
Team
Scrum
Team
RM
RM
TW
DEV
DEV
QA
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
Moreira 2013
(C) Mario E

28. Education Vision
• Laying the groundwork to educate
• Awareness
• Training
 Skills, Process, Roles
• Guidance
 Coaching, Mentoring
• Reading
 Books, Website, Blogs, Journal
• Giving Back
 Champions circle
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

29. Agile Measures of Success
• How do you know you are Agile?
 Are you “Doing Agile” (i.e.,
mechanical adoption)?
 Are you “Being Agile” (i.e.,
cultural transformation)?
 Are you receiving business benefit
(revenue)?
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

30. Wrap-up and take-aways
• Agile is a set of Values and Principles (only)
• Agile is a state of being (Being Agile)
• Agile should be part of the business strategy
• A strong focus on delivering customer value
• Get ready for your Agile adventure
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013

31. Questions and Answers
Thank You!
Check out my Agile Adoption Blog at:
http://cmforagile.blogspot.com/
Getting Ready for your Agile Adventure
Consider the new Agile book entitled:
Being Agile:
Your Roadmap to adopting Agile
(C) Mario E Moreira 2013