Services

Through my consulting company, Leffingwell, LLC., I provide enterprise lean|agile transformation consulting, training and mentoring services to larger software enterprises. This work is based on my experiences in the enterprise setting, the content of my various books and typically uses the Scaled Agile Framework (TM) as a starting point. In addition, my Scaled Agile Partners, Drew Jemilo, Colin O’Neill, Alex Yakyma, Mauricio Zamora and Drew Jemilo, often assist me with the larger scale rollouts. Each of them has skills and experience uniquely suited to the enterprise setting.

While much of our work is custom consulting, purpose-built to the unique context and challenges of each enterprise, certain of our services exist as package offerings that have proven to be effective building blocks. Some of these are described below.

Setting the Stage: Lean|Agile Leadership Workshop

The two-day Leading and Effective Lean|Agile Transformation leadership workshop is intended for executives, managers, and team leads that are considering or implementing a Lean or Agile transformation, as well as for those leaders of any software organization needing a step-change improvement in software development productivity and quality. The workshop is an interactive, experiential-based format with tutorial and hands-on exercises, coupled with ample opportunities for discussion of applicability to the company’s current software development challenges. Modules include Lean Thinking, Introduction to Agility, Experiencing Scrum, Advanced Enterprise Practices, and the Agile Release Train. The final module, Agile Leadership, is a half-day focused solely on developing the leadership skills necessary to lead the lean|agile enterprise and build high performing agile teams. Download the syllabus here: Lean Agile Leadership Workshop Syllabus

Since your enterprise will ultimately be no more lean or agile than your executives thinking, this course is often the right place to start.

Upcoming Public Lean|Agile Leadership Workshops in Australia and new Zealand

Most of my workshops are delivered at a client’s site. However, I do have three public workshops scheduled in Sydney (February 7-8),  Melbourne (Feb 14-15) hand Auckland, NZ (Feb 28-29), 2012. You can register for these workshops through Agile University here:

Scrum for Teams in the Enterprise

Scrum provides a lightweight and effective framework for implementing agility at the team level. Our two-day Scrum for Teams in the Enterprise (S4TE) class provides an introduction and practical experience with the Scrum team framework. In addition, this class includes an introduction to agility at scale via a half-day Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Larger Enterprises module. And, since our enterprises operate at scale, our delivery model must operate at scale, so we often deliver this class for 50-100 practitioners at the same time (5-15 teams). While this might sound a bit chaotic, it’s really fun and effective, and all the teams learn Scrum, build their backlog, write user stories and acceptance criteria and learn the basic disciplines, roles, meetings and cadence of the Scrum framework at the same time. Equally importantly, this class starts to build the relationships and trust that provide the foundation for the “Ba” of a dynamic, knowledge-acquiring agile program.

Workshop topics include: Scaling Agility, Scrum philosophy and basic practices, Roles in Scrum – Product Owner, ScrumMaster and Team, Building the product backlog, Writing user stories, Agile estimating, Developing acceptance criteria, Scrum ceremonies, Sprint planning and tracking, Sprint review and retrospective, Release planning

The workshop includes hands on exercises designed to help teams experience Scrum and to build real project assets for the team’s first sprint. At the end of the workshop, teams will be prepared to begin to implement Scrum in their individual team and program settings.

Agile Release Train Release Planning Workshop

This facilitated workshop/planning session is designed to provide a common vision, mission and joint commitment to a set of agreed to program objectives. During the workshop, the vision is set by the company’s executives, and program and product managers, and a plan for multiple sprints is created by the teams. The output of the session is a committed plan for the next release with measurable objectives and iteration plans. You can learn more about this important program best practice in the Release Planning category on this blog.

Agile Release Train Program QuickStart

When you are ready to take the plunge, putting some of these elements together creates a five-day program that will kickstart the launch of your most important programs down an agile path. Objectives of this offering include:

• Train 50-100 team members, (typically organized in to 8-12 newly formed Scrum teams in a common program), in the principles of Scaling Software Agility and the implementation of Scrum in an enterprise context
• Align the team to a common enterprise mission and product backlog and plan for the first release or potentially shippable increment (PSI, 8-12 weeks) of software. Establish iteration plans and measurable PSI objectives
• Introduce prospective Product Owners and ScrumMasters to the principles and practices unique to their role in the new agile enterprise
• Build a context and repetitive model for rolling-wave release planning, objective setting, program execution and adaptive feedback which provides a continuous flow of value to the user or marketplace

This is the fastest way to get your larger product, service, or application value streams delivering the benefits of agile at scale. A syllabus is here:

Agile Release Train Quickstart 2011

Enterprise Agility Assessments and Recommendations

For companies who have already rolled out agility in some or all of the enterprise, we’ve also done a series of Enterprise Agility Assessments and Recommendations. In this engagement, we 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, we provide a set of recommendations for taking the company to the next level of productivity, quality and ROI benefits.

Scaled Agile Service Partners

As I mentioned above, my service delivery partners, Drew Jemilo, Colin O’Neill, Alex Yakyma, and Mauricio Zamora often assist with large rollouts. Their short bios are below. Not to worry, these guys really get agile at scale.

Drew Jemilo

Drew Jemilo has over 20 years of experience using Agile, Lean, and traditional methodologies in companies ranging from startups to global $1 billion corporations. He has worked in the US and Europe applying technical and leadership experience in Agile program and portfolio management, change management, organizational design, coaching, and training.

After starting his career at Anderson Consulting in the late 80s and early 90s, he move to Van Kampen Funds, a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley, where he used early adaptive methods to define and build new software products, as well as migrate off their legacy systems.  Following that, he joined a private startup consulting company of 40 employees.  As IT Director, he helped it grow to a global public company of 1,700.

I first began collaborating with Drew in early 2009 when he was developing a scaled Agile methodology for a management consulting company to bridge their strategic business framework with Agile.  Most recently, we worked together with a large global client to synchronize distributed teams in the US, India and Eastern and Western Europe, with a significant number of mostly independent, yet necessarily cooperative, Agile Release Trains.

Colin O’Neill, CSM, CSP

As an Annapolis graduate and U.S. Marine Corps officer, Colin ( ScaledAgile.com) acquired significant expertise leading empowered, self-organizing teams. He leverages that experience in the Agile world as a Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Scrum Professional to help organizations adopt Dean Leffingwell’s Scaled Agile Framework. The result of 30+ years of experience is Scaled Agile, Inc., a company that delivers a full suite of products and services to help organizations achieve Scaled Agile transformation in the shortest time yet most comprehensive manner possible. The Scaled Agile Process flagship product is the most comprehensive Agile process on the market today. In addition to clear, concise workflows at the Team, Program, and Portfolio levels, it contains over 25 Agile Practices that each solve a particular problem and can be adopted independent of one another.

Colin has helped multiple Fortune 500 companies adopt Agile, including Walmart, John Deere, and Safeway. IBM has published two of Colin’s papers, and he was a speaker at the 2010 Rational Software Conference.

Alex Yakyma

Oleksandr (Alex) Yakyma (www.yakyma.com), of Kyiv, Ukraine, is an agile trainer and consultant who has been applying agile practices in the software industry for over a decade. Alex has worked with me on a number of larger accounts over the last few years, often providing support for the Europe and India offshore development shops of our larger clients.

Formerly, as program manager and agile master at leading outsourcing software provider, Luxoft, Inc., he built a number of successful agile teams. He also served as director of software development for Internet identity company ProQuo, Inc., headquartered in San Diego, CA, where he worked under my direction.  He is an agile thought leader and has published a number of whitepapers on agile methods to his Ukrainian and Russian audience. Alex is fluent in English, Ukrainian, Russian, XP, Scrum and Test-Driven Development.

Mauricio Zamora

Mauricio Zamora (Innate-agility.com) is an entrepreneur and senior software industry executive with two decades experience delivering software using agile principles and practices. He has led numerous large scale and mission critical agile product management and software development efforts at companies such as Telution, LLC. and CSG International, Inc. While at CSG, Mauricio led the shift towards enterprise scale agility for a development organization that today exceeds 600+ engineering resources. Within the first year of the transformation, CSG had over 140 development resources executing in parallel two-week iterations on their flagship integrated product suite. He is actively involved in the agile community and has contributed to several books, articles and webinars. Mauricio is fluent in English and Spanish.