Leffingwell, LLC.
I sometimes provide enterprise agility transformation consulting and mentoring services through my consulting company, Leffingwell, LLC.
Most of my work is custom and context specific, meaning that my first obligation is to understand the client’s actual needs and then determine whether I can be of assistance. So while services are often ad hoc (“purpose built” sounds so much more professional), over the last year I’ve been packaging some service descriptions to make it easier to talk about potential transformation strategies. These are described in the form of a potential road map in the graphic below.
Agile Enterprise Transformation Services Roadmap
Learning Enterprise Agile: Open Enrollment Class in Scaling Software Agility
For those managers and change agents who are trying to understand the application of enterprise agility before they make a serious recommendation, the open enrollment classes that I offer on occasion may be just the trick. You can usually find one offered through Agile University. Here’s a short form syllabus. You can also contact me for more information.
Approaching the Transition: Reaching the Agile Enterprise Tipping Point
Recently, I’ve been working with a number of large companies who are considering a substantial agile transformation. Typically, the development teams or some outside agents have introduced agile as a potential solution to a host of problems – productivity, quality, time to market, whatever – but the managers and executives aren’t quite ready to “take the plunge.” Their reticence may be due to lack of understanding of the methods themselves, the “agile is just for small teams” rallying cry of critics, too many agile Dilbert cartoons, or just the understandable fear of change on such a large scope. (No professional Agilist has ever said “this will be easy”).
No matter the source of their reticence, if management can’t be tipped, the organization can’t be tipped and the benefits of enterprise agile adoption will remain just out of reach. I’ve designed this service package: Reaching the Agile Enterprise Tipping Point: A Two Day Workshop for just this purpose.
Taking the Plunge: An All-in Training and Release Planning Workshop
For those enterprises that have finished their contemplation and are ready to take the plunge, I often deliver a five day combined agile team training and release planning immersion workshop. Typically we gather teams into a “planning domain” (i.e. some set (5-10) of agile teams that need to work together to build cooperative systems) consisting of up to as many as 50-100 team members. These teams benefit greatly from training and planning together as they share a common experience and can simultaneously address their interdependencies and make mutual commitments.
There are typically three elements to this workshop:
- Modularized, custom, agile training: Scrum for Teams, Scrum for Scrum/Agile Masters and Scrum for Product Owners – two days.
- Facilitated Release Planning: Creating a multi-iteration plan with clear objectives for the next release – two days
- Tooling strategy, retrospective, next steps and closure - one day
The output of this workshop includes:
- Some number of trained agile teams
- An agreed to iteration cadence and set of basic agile practices
- A plan for the first release
- A plan for release management
Building the Agile Enterprise: Enterprise Agility Assessments and Recommendations
For companies who have already rolled out agility in some or all of the enterprise, I’ve recently been doing a series of Enterprise Agility Assessments and Recommendations. In this engagement, I typically interview the enterprise’s executive stakeholders as well as agile team members with respect to the state of the current agile transformation. These interviews are usually organized by role – dev managers, Scrum/agile masters, product owners and product managers, architects, quality and test managers, team leads, etc.
One dimension of the engagement is focused on assessing the development team’s current progress with agile technical and agile project management practices. The second dimension of the assessment focuses on understanding the next level of impediments that exist – those which often occur at the program, governance and portfolio level. Based on this input, I draft a set of recommendations for taking the company to the next level of productivity, quality and ROI benefits. I then present these recommendations to key stakeholders for their consideration in plotting the next course of action.
Other Service Providers
When I can’t help, I like to recommend other experienced practitioners and consulting organizations who can mentor, coach, and train enterprise software teams to successfully adopt and adapt enterprise-scale agile practices. Here’s a list of people I can recommend, in alphabetical order.
Inspect and Adapt
Inspect & Adapt Ltd are a UK based agile consultancy, training and coaching firm who have a wealth of experience in advising individuals, teams and organisations in their attempts at adopting agile techniques. Comprising of a small group of highly experienced coaches and Certified Scrum Trainers, Inspect & Adapt has applied Scrum, XP and Lean principles to help a number of organisations from various industries navigate a way towards a more agile way of working.
Net Objectives
Their Vision
Maximizing Product Development ROI through use of Lean Principles, Agile Processes and Best Development Practices
Maximize your product development ROI through the use of our 3 P’s: Lean Principles, Agile Processes and Best Development Practices. Net Objectives provides the most comprehensive training curriculum in the industry. With nearly 40 courses available covering topics ranging from management to deployment, you can secure the training you need to effectively use the 3 P’s to improve organizations, teams and individuals. Training is available through public courses or can be delivered at your facilities. In addition, all training is modular and may be customized to best meet your specific needs. Net Objectives can also supply coaches to help with transitions, to increase retention of new material, or to help in a particular area of difficulty. Whether your organization is a single team, or a large multi-national enterprise, Net Objectives has the experience and knowledge to help you achieve your goals. Visit our website at www.netobjectives.com to get more information.
Rally Software
From an initial pilot project to enterprise rollout, Rally helps companies succeed with Agile software development, Rally’s family of Agile life cycle management products give teams the visibility and collaboration needed to deliver high-value software in rapid iterations, and its world-renowned coaching services help mentor teams to create internal Agile experts. Based in Boulder, Colo., Rally maps an incremental road to Agile adoption for thousands of subscribers from leading software vendors, Internet companies and corporate development teams. For more information, visit www.rallydev.com.
Trail Ridge Consulting
Pete Behrens of Trail Ridge Consulting is guiding large enterprise agile transitions. Pete has a rich background in traditional phased-based approaches and what it takes to successfully scale agility. He specifically targets and addresses each of the Agile Enterprise Practices outlined in this book covering agile architecture, just-in-time requirements, release management, distributed teams, organizational structures, operational impacts and business performance.
Pete Behrens is a Certified Scrum Trainer and Coach developing business and technical agile executives. He guides leadership in building creative, open and collaborative business/technical environments; creating self-organizing, empowered, focused and disciplined teams; and delivering earlier, more frequent and higher quality solutions for the business. For more information on Pete and Trail Ridge Consulting, visit www.trailridgeconsulting.com
