Insurance Company

Situation:

A large-scale launch of Scrum for 120 IT staff and business system owners.  A rapid start-up was needed.

Action:

• Quickly put teams into action defining product backlogs and trained them on user story writing. 
• Trained ScrumMasters and brought teams into sprints. 
• Mentored the project leader and members of management.  
• Motivated management to hire resources for concurrent testing. 
• Installed automated tools for testing and continuous integration. 
• Facilitated formation of collaboration cradles for product owners and ScrumMasters. 
• Set up metrics on productivity, resource focus, and estimation accuracy.
• Trained and coached Product Owners on release planning, feature prioritization, clarity in feature set definition, and effective contribution to sprint planning and responsive participation in sprint reviews and retrospectives. 
• Outlined new roles for displaced project managers. 

Results:

• The Scrum framework became firmly embedded. 
• Collaboration was established between business and IT and among business system owners. 
• A product coordination team was set up to provide top-level direction. 
• Continuous integration with TDD was put in place for Java development. 
• Resource focus metrics were guiding resource management in non-dedicated teams. 
• Velocity and estimation accuracy doubled after five sprints.

Financial Publisher

Situation:

Scrum was improperly implemented (“Scrumbutt”).  Productivity low, testing ineffective, high technical debt, team externally directed

Action:

•     Trained a distributed team of developers and testers in Scrum practices on a path to improved productivity 

•     Mentored the product owner to adapt his role so as to enhance team collaboration and self-organization 

•     Initiated a robust feature-level testing discipline

•     Aligned sprint planning, sprint retrospectives, and daily stand-ups with Scrum recommended practices

Results:

•     Team adopted Scrum practices (DONE, READY) for high productivity.  Velocity doubled with no technical debt.

Direct Marketing Services Company

Situation:

An ambitious client-facing software project was stalled

Action:

•     Launched Scrum to accelerate the project

•     Introduced Scrum and trained project teams and client top management

•     Created techniques to synchronize distributed teams.  Supported continued adherence to the Scrum framework

Results:

•     A hyper-productive development organization that delivered more functionality in the first month than had been possible in the preceding six months prior to Scrum

•     The project was put back on track for an early delivery date, and client satisfaction is high

Financial Institution

Situation:

Project initiations faced delays, and work productivity was sub-optimal under prescriptive plan-driven project management.  MS Project schedules were treated as complete project plans.  Absence of transparent deliverable priorities and ownership resulted in constant task switching.

Action:

•     Successfully introduced the Scrum framework and key Agile practices

•     A Qualytic Certified ScrumMaster led projects and facilitated adoption of Scrum through formal orientations reinforced by intensive coaching of project teams

Results:

•     Faster project startups, sustainable work momentum, daily focus on project work, less waste from task switching, and a lean format for meetings

•     Conventional projects also adopted key Agile principles:  schedules are deliverables-oriented, teams are self-organizing at the task level, and micro-scheduling is eliminated 

Information Infrastructure Provider

Situation:

The timeline to deployment of a critical enterprise application was aggressive.  The target go-live date could not be met with conventional waterfall project management.

Action:

An Agile / XP project to rapidly produce working software using iterative development, on-site customer proxy, daily team synchronization, and continuous integration

Results:

Deployed the application weeks ahead of the target go-live date, with more functionality than planned