Agile And Lean Program Management: Scaling Coll...
Different scaling Agile frameworks can smooth the process, but there are three challenges leaders face when trying to implement Agile enterprise-wide: making shifts in the culture, in work management methods, and in technology. These can be viewed as a three-legged stool: failure to transform just one causes the entire Agile initiative to collapse. Agile program management helps the organization make these transformations successfully. The section ends with five main benefits of scaling Agile.
Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Coll...
Organizations new to scaling Agile often lack systems to coordinate and connect multiple teams to deliver against larger programs, initiatives, or strategies. Supporting team flexibility and autonomy often results in less visibility to connect delivery to broader strategic outcomes. This is where Kanban software supports Agile Program Management.
A release train engineer (RTE) is a servant leader who facilitates program level processes and execution, drives continuous development, manages risks and escalates impediments while also acting as a full time chief scrum master for a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). SAFe is a collection of organization and workflow patterns that was created with the intention of scaling Lean and Agile software development practices. A servant leader is a person within the organization who focuses on providing whatever support is needed to the project teams and Agile release trains (ARTs).
The AgilePgM certification offered by UK-based APMG International offers the planning, management, and communication skills required for agile program implementation. It offers hands-on knowledge of incremental development, in which each consecutive version of a product is usable, and is developed on the previous iteration based on user feedback. The AgilePgM can be earned independently without coursework, which various training providers do offer for those who need it. The certification is currently offered in foundational proficiency only.
The Agile Certified Professional credential from the Project Management Institute (PMI) covers several approaches to agile such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, extreme programming, and test-driven development to increase your versatility, no matter how the project spirals out. The three-hour exam has 120 multiple-choice questions. To maintain the PMI-ACP, 30 professional development units in agile topics must be completed every three years. Prerequisites include a secondary degree, 21 contact hours of training in agile practices, 12 months of general project experience within the past five years, and eight months of agile project experience within the past three years.
The Master of Science Program for Project Management at Harrisburg University offers traditional and agile project management programs that respond to local and global needs using online and face-to-face instructional methods.
This course provides the student with a solid foundation of agile frameworks that have been scaled to the enterprise synchronizing alignment, collaboration, and delivery for large numbers of teams. One of the more popular enterprise agile frameworks called the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) will be studied and analyzed. This framework has been a proven framework for enterprises applying integrated principles and practices for Lean, Agile, Systems Thinking, and DevOps. In addition to SAFe, the course provides the student with an overview of other popular frameworks for scaling the enterprise, such as: The Disciplined Agile (DA), the Large-Scaled Scrum (LeSS), Nexus, Scrum@Scale, and Scrum of Scrum (SoS).
This level course provides the student with key strategies in agile lean product development that will help the student streamline new product development processes that will decrease time-to-market, reduce waste, enhance product quality, and fully integrate new product designs into a lean production environment. This course uses principles rooted in the iconic Toyota Production system.
Scaled Agile Lean Development (ScALeD) helps businesses discover a balanced approach to agile transition and scaling questions. The ScALed approach helps businesses successfully respond to change. Inspired by a combination of lean and agile values, ScALed is practitioner-based and can be completed through various agile frameworks and practices.
The scaled agile framework (SAFe) is a set of organization and workflow patterns intended to guide enterprises in scaling lean and agile practices.[1][2] Along with disciplined agile delivery (DAD), SAFe is one of a growing number of frameworks that seek to address the problems encountered when scaling beyond a single team.[3][4]
SAFe promotes alignment, collaboration, and delivery across large numbers of agile teams. It was developed by and for practitioners, by leveraging three primary bodies of knowledge: agile software development, lean product development, and systems thinking.[5]
The primary reference for the scaled agile framework was originally the development of a big picture view of how work flowed from product management (or other stakeholders), through governance, program, and development teams, out to customers.[6][7] With the collaboration of others in the agile community, this was progressively refined and then first formally described in a 2007 book.[8] The framework continues to be developed and shared publicly; with an academy and an accreditation scheme supporting those who seek to implement, support, or train others in the adoption of SAFe.
While SAFe continues to be recognised as the most common approach to scaling agile practices (at 30 percent and growing),[11][12][page needed],[13] it also has received criticism for being too hierarchical and inflexible.[14]
The SAFe planning cycle recommends including an additional iteration after a release, allowing teams to improve their practices and are ready for the next planning increment. Earlier editions of SAFe also designed this to be a hardening iteration, namely to stabilize or harden the product before releasing it. This was predicated on the complications of working with large integration environments where dependencies prevented several matters from being tested until the very end. SAFe was criticized for this because it represented an anti-agile or waterfall element, but was in line with lean 90-day increments which make 13 weeks, and if doing two-week sprints you need six of them plus a one-week planning or hardening cycle.[19] This is not included in recent editions of SAFe.
Successfully scaling an agile operating model requires new skills, behaviors, and mind-sets across the organization. This is vitally important and constitutes an intensive phase of an agile transformation. Most organizations require existing staff to take on these new roles or responsibilities, and as such, need a way to build new skills and capabilities. Specifically, any successful agile transformation will invariably create a capability accelerator to retrain and reorganize staff, make the agile idea common to all, and develop the right skills across the organization.
As an example, Roche, a global healthcare company, launched a global leadership initiative as a central component of its transformation to become a more agile enterprise. It designed a four-day program with a combined focus on personal and organizational transformation. More than 4,000 leaders have now been touched by the effort, helping to shift the collective consciousness and capabilities for leaders to deliver the change.
John Deere wrestled with missed delivery dates, quality issues, and lack of product ownership using a release train scaling approach to software delivery. Introducing agile practices and the LeSS framework, the company performed an organizational restructuring, creating cross-functional, co-located teams, a single product owner, and a high-quality product backlog.
In this section, we review related work in order to position our research in the field of requirements management and software engineering research. We also present background information that is beneficial for understanding our case study and its relation to previous research. First, we summarize two recent secondary studies on agile requirements engineering. Second, we discuss research on organizing and managing large-scale agile development. Third, we review three models proposed for scaling agile development in order to provide a point of comparison to our case.
Although research literature on large-scale agile development organizational models is scarce, many consultants and practitioners have proposed different kinds of models for scaling agile development based on their experiences. We briefly review three notably different prescriptive models to provide an overview of the subject and to allow comparisons to our case. The model proposed by Schwaber (2007) has been included because Ken Schwaber is considered the most influential figure in the creation of the original Scrum method (Schwaber and Beedle 2002). At the time of writing, two popular commercial scaled agile frameworks are Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS)Footnote 2 and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)Footnote 3, both being prescriptive models. Figure 1 illustrates the different proposed development organizations.
Although these models are purportedly based on experiences in real software development organizations, the empirical validation of the models is weak. As Fig. 1 illustrates, the structure of the organization differs between the models considerably, as do the requirements management processes. Clearly more empirical research on planning, organizing development and managing requirements is required to evaluate the benefits and problems of different agile scaling models, as well as to study to what kind of circumstances each is best suitable.
Enterprise Agile aims to bring the advantages of Agile - rapid feedback, quick response to change, incremental development - at the enterprise level.The practice of Enterprise Agile encompasses lean portfolio management, agile funding, agile team, and scaled agile - initiatives involving multiple agile teams. 041b061a72