Managing Large-Scale Agile Transformations - Experiences At Yahoo!

The document discusses the challenges and opportunities of adopting agile practices in large enterprises. It covers three key aspects to consider: social/political factors, the technical environment, and external market conditions. Additionally, it identifies three important conditions for enterprise agile adoption: strategy, structure, and culture. The document then outlines a process for agile adoption including visioning, approval, staffing, development, deployment and feedback. It shares some examples of challenges experienced and results seen from early adopters. Finally, it discusses the concept of business agility and how organizations can sense, respond and adapt to changing market conditions.

Learn the mindset you need to support an Agile change across organisational structure, processes, culture and teams. Leaders and managers are critical enablers in helping their organisation be successful, yet their role in an Agile environment can be quite different from what they are used to. In this workshop, you’ll learn about the Agile mindset and what it means as a leader to create the right conditions for Agile to thrive. We’ll focus on the pragmatic aspects of Agile leadership, the role of leadership in Agile transformation, and how to support cultural changes, as well as the structures and operating models to align teams, programs and portfolios and help them work in harmony. During this workshop you’ll learn: About the Agile mindset and why it’s important for leaders How mindset, culture, and values influence your ability to be Agile How to create a high-performance culture Practical skills for helping you set up and support Agile teams, programs and portfolios Pragmatic techniques for scaling an Agile mindset Unlocking the metrics for measuring your organisational agility. This workshop is suitable for: Managers embarking on an Agile transformation Line managers, Product Owners and Business Owners who want to get the most out of their Agile journey Portfolio, Program and Product Managers who want to get the most out of Agile ways of working.

This document provides an overview of agile certifications and the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) certification in particular. It discusses the various certifying bodies that offer agile certifications and describes the requirements, costs, reference materials, and exam content for the PMI-ACP. The exam consists of 120 multiple choice questions covering 50% tools and techniques and 50% agile knowledge and skills. It also provides results from the PMI-ACP pilot program which showed over 500 individuals earned the certification.

The document provides guidance on making agile transformations stick within organizations. It emphasizes focusing on values, principles and behaviors over mechanics. Key steps include: getting leaders aligned on desired outcomes; training everyone in agile; allowing teams to start without too much tweaking; and watching for danger signs like too much process or role confusion and addressing them. The overall message is that genuine culture change takes time and organizations should fail fast, adapt often, and amplify successes.

This document provides a five step approach to adopting agility across an entire organization. The first step is to build agile skills in people by establishing an agile role progression and providing training tailored to different roles. The second step is to make the adoption agile itself by educating stakeholders, establishing accountable adoption teams, and launching pilot projects. The third step is to focus agility at different levels including focusing the product portfolio, releasing more frequently, and letting teams flow work independently. The fourth step is to not forget principles of innovation like using scrum patterns, the lean startup approach, and flexible budgeting frameworks. The final step is that frameworks are just tools and the core is to create a simple but reliable agile process.

Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides principles for designing software applications as suites of independently deployable services with a bare minimum of centralized management of these services. Benefits of SOA include the ability to learn/combine/grow/deliver these services to please customers, anticipating failures and handling change. If your organization struggles to deliver fast across multiple teams, fails to anticipate failure or handle rapid change, the 14 principles behind Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) applied to organizations offer a solution. We call this Service Oriented Teams (SOT). In this session we will learn the benefits of modeling your organization in Services Oriented Teams (SOT). This includes improved information flow, ability to expose internal functionality, organizational flexibility, service re-use, lower development and management costs, configuration flexibility. We will do this by applying SOA principles and methods to Agile teams in an all-hands-on-deck workshop, using LEGO®’s as team modeling tools, and SOA methods as teams’ interfaces. Learning Outcomes: In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn: - an introduction to Services Oriented Architecture and how applying this to organizational design helps to promote high performing, learning and highly effective teams - how SOTs operate as self-orchestrated ecosystems of teams that are, in fact, Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) the benefits of modeling organizational structure to influence the architectural direction of your product (Conway’s law) - why SOA principles are as relevant for teams as they are for software architecture - how to design organizations to maximize flow of product - with fewer handoffs and better communication - why change management is no longer needed with teams’ ability to adapt “baked in” to the organization - how to define smart team interfaces to accelerate independent delivery - how SOT teams can configure/reconfigure so that other teams are not impacted - how to build teams to promote knowledge, knowledge reuse, and growth - how to focus on the bare minimum of centralized management of SOT. - how investing, nurturing, developing high performing teams is mandatory - when standard patterns for org design should be broken to remove bottlenecks - the benefit of avoiding Conway law silos by organizing teams in service oriented teams responsible for development and delivery

Tathagat Varma

This document provides an overview and introduction to agile concepts and Scrum. It begins with the objectives to provide a baseline understanding of agile and discusses why agile principles are needed in contrast to traditional predictive management. It then defines what agile and Scrum are, focusing on transparency, inspection and adaptation. Potential pitfalls of misapplying agile concepts are also covered. The document aims to educate practitioners on doing agile properly through mentored learning and finding the right approach for each situation.

The document discusses how engineering managers can adapt to an agile work environment. It describes how one company addressed common challenges like product owner and architect shortages by having managers take on those roles. Managers were also given responsibilities like goal setting, cross-team knowledge sharing, and helping teams improve practices. This engaged managers in delivery while addressing skills gaps. The company also emphasized team success for performance reviews and career goals over individual metrics. This helped managers and other leads transition successfully to agile.

Explore how leaders can guide their organizations past common barriers and accelerate the momentum towards true organizational agility.

This document discusses successful Agile teams at scale. It begins by explaining why organizations want to adopt Agile practices like shorter time-to-market and improved quality. However, true Agile adoption requires changes to business, culture and ways of working. The document then discusses scaling Agile through frameworks like SAFe and DAD which provide structure for large, distributed teams. Supporting practices for Agile at scale include risk management, delivery assurance and governance. Finally, the document states that successful Agile teams at scale provide benefits like reduced time-to-value and improved business relationships, but require investments in people, processes and tools to support collaboration.

What changes are needed in management and leadership to move towards the new lean culture of creative and knowledge work? My presentation from Agile Finland's Modern Agile Breakfast.