Embracing SCRUM – One step at a Time

Niraj Kumar Bhandari

- Niraj Kumar Bhandari

What can you expect

A Real life case study

With Real world challenges

Encourages you to experiment

No Quick-fix’es

Not for Purists

Lets Start on the journey

And make it interactive

Why Me

Why should you listen to me

Know Your Speaker a Little

The Context

Consumer Internet Industry

Speed of execution is everything

18-member team

A very supportive top management

Concerns on speed of delivery

A Textbook case for going Agile ?

The Team

18 members

Large even by traditional standards

A mix of employees and third party engineers

New Team

First two releases very successful but then…

The DynamiX

The Classical “We vs. They”

Production issues

Often post-release

“Issues are orphan”

The Fine-print

New team put together to transition a product line

Support supposed to be there for 2 months

Really ?

Complete ownership to new team

Delivery of products slowing down

Roll-backs creeping in

Still a text book case for introducing Agile ?

Going Agile Way

Developers not comfortable with daily standups

Standups taken as status meetings

“Everybody needs freedom to work”

Seen as encroaching dev turf

By the Way I too was a techie !!

Interpretation of Agile tenants

“Trust”

“Mutual Respect”

Let's take a step back

Going Agile.. Embracing Scrum

Stories

Early working deliverables

Team

Empowerment

Accountability

And the current context ?

The Goal – Increase the speed of execution

Baby Steps… Setting Expectations

Setting expectation

Can you really set expectations in consumer internet

To Whom

What about support Groups

Internal stakeholders

What next….

Form smaller teams

Small enough to ensure interdependency

Takes a lot of time to get smoothened out

Break Silos

Set expectations

It is one team

Are we ready at this stage to empower the team

Probably Not

What about the product….

Use Phased Approach

Need to break down product into smaller viable pieces

Stakeholders buy-in

Multiple iterations each phase

Further breakdown phases into smaller iterations

Let team come up with it

Essentially we are talking

Release Planning

Sprint Planning

Product Development …. 2

Every Iteration has multiple demos…

Working or not

Demo planning left to dev team

Buffers

None planned

Team allowed to re-plan the work

Essentially getting team ready for “sprinting”

Product DEVELOPMENT …. 3

Celebrate every milestone

Provides more opportunities for bonding to smaller teams

Teams Encouraged to dissect their problems

Failure on any front treated as learning opportunity

Slowly helped team build trust

But at the same time

Someone had to take a hit

It is consumer internet after all

Product DEVELOPMENT …. 4

What about sprints

Could we have done fixed duration sprints

May be or May be Not

How do you plan for production issues

After all everything is a P1 for frontline staff

Plus there is a potential for bad PR

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT …. 5

How did we do

People

Execution

Team Empowerment

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT …. 6

How long did it take us

~7 months

Could we have done better

Should we have adopted Agile and Scrum Principles completely

Should we do it now ?

Key Takeaways