DTAL Technologies

The Road to Agile Adoption

Dtal provides Agile training to enterprises and start-ups to equip their product teams with the fundamental concepts of Agile. Although many express they are agile, there are still many misconceptions that eliminate benefits that Agile has to offer.

Overwhelmingly positive, yet challenging adoption

87% of those using Agile report that their work life has improved (The 2015 state of Scrum report) and majority of agile projects are successful. The top causes for failures have to do with culture clashes with lack of support in cultural transition and lack of experience with consistent agile practices. External pressures to follow pre-existing / waterfall frameworks and general resistance to change further aggravate these challenges. (10th Annual State of Agile Report)

"Agile triples the rate and value of innovation." – Agile Innovation, Bain&Company, 2015

Top 6 causes of failed agile projects: company culture clash with agile values, lack of experience with agile methods, lack of management support, lack of support in cultural transition, inconsistent agile practices and processes, external pressure to follow waterfall processes. Blockers to further agile adoption are stated as ability to change organizational culture, general resistance to change and pre-existing rigid / waterfall framework. Management support is essential, Success Metrics lacking, Transition from waterfall

Fortunately there are solutions to these problems. With right focus on the principles and foundations of Agile we can make impact on the mind-set of people. This should be done not within organizational silos, but across functions so that change works across organizational boundaries. When talking about mind-set and culture change, having strong experiential element supports this. Experiential action also helps to attack the other challenge – lack of exposure to good and consistent Agile practices. Exposing cross functional teams for both of these aspects brings agile adoption to an excellent start. Dtal Agile training works for all cross functional roles, deals strongly with values and principles hooking these into concrete Agile practices in an experiential way.

Most organizations are in motion and there is no way to stop to make change take place. Thus adopting change in appropriate steps, with knowledge and commitment to the grand journey ahead is a good approach. This requires coaching and guidance so that adoption is taken forward in steps that give best value to the organization and handling correctly the agile principles and goals so as not to side track the movement. Coaching, especially when done as an immediate follow up from agile training is powerful tool to start taking advantage of benefits that agile has to offer.

Dtal uses the following approach to train the project team:

Phase 1

Preparation

Phase 2

Adoption

Phase 3

Owned

Phase 4

Enabled

Internalized goal of potentially shippable product increment
Self-organised
Only limited facilitation is needed
Team handles disruptions
On-boards people actively driven by constantly improving empirical process
Team collaboration that makes SM redundant
PO, Development Team and Scrum Master work as a one whole unit

Basic Agile/Scrum trained
Use Scrum Board
Have Sprint Goals
Regular Scrum Events
Understand intent of Events
Team showcase awareness by crisp and relevant updates
Team participates in Planning, Demo, Retro and Backlog refinement
Team consists of PO, designers, developers and QAs.
SM role is largely facilitated by coaches.

Backlog actively groomed and stories broken down constantly
Sizing is done by the team
Team plans with velocity
Burndown charts used
Self-organising stand-ups
Demos with audience
Shared product vision and sprint goal
Stories done demonstrated
Feedback added to backlog
Active team retrospectives
Safe environment and Co-located team
Action Items of improvement

The team include design
Team active in backlog grooming
PO drives Planning 1 with conversations, visuals, vision and goal and development team drives planning 2 with task and story breakdown
SM role identified
Stand-ups with highest value done and focus on common awareness (updates, blockers, help)
Team improves flow and expands metrics
Conducts demos regularly
Active improvement loop with rhythm established

Internalized goal of potentially shippable product increment
Self-organised
Only limited facilitation is needed
Team handles disruptions
On-boards people actively driven by constantly improving empirical process
Team collaboration that makes SM redundant
PO, Development Team and Scrum Master work as a one whole unit

Basic Agile/Scrum trained
Use Scrum Board
Have Sprint Goals
Regular Scrum Events
Understand intent of Events
Team showcase awareness by crisp and relevant updates
Team participates in Planning, Demo, Retro and Backlog refinement
Team consists of PO, designers, developers and QAs.
SM role is largely facilitated by coaches.

Backlog actively groomed and stories broken down constantly
Sizing is done by the team
Team plans with velocity
Burndown charts used
Self-organising stand-ups
Demos with audience
Shared product vision and sprint goal
Stories done demonstrated
Feedback added to backlog
Active team retrospectives
Safe environment and Co-located team
Action Items of improvement

The team include design
Team active in backlog grooming
PO drives Planning 1 with conversations, visuals, vision and goal and development team drives planning 2 with task and story breakdown
SM role identified
Stand-ups with highest value done and focus on common awareness (updates, blockers, help)
Team improves flow and expands metrics
Conducts demos regularly
Active improvement loop with rhythm established

Internalized goal of potentially shippable product increment
Self-organised
Only limited facilitation is needed
Team handles disruptions
On-boards people actively driven by constantly improving empirical process
Team collaboration that makes SM redundant
PO, Development Team and Scrum Master work as a one whole unit

Dtal Agile mindset workshop and training includes:

Understanding the Nature of Problems
Undestanding of People
Mission Mindset, Commander's Intent
PDCA, OODA and Build Measure Life Cycles
Lean: Focus and Concept of Waste
Storyboard and Story Map
From Specifications to Backlog
Writing User Stories
Scrum Events, Artifacts, Roles
Practicing Scrum: Theory and Practice
Backlog, Burndown
Metrics, Managing Project with Data
Getting things Done
Demonstrating PSPI
Agile Engineering Practises

Benefits of Agile development

The benefits of Agile development are already well acknowledged and if implemented correctly can help companies get the most out of their software investments. Here are just a few reasons why you should start adopting Agile development principles and practices:

Time to Market: Speed to market is key to competitive advantage and profitability. Agile incremental delivery and regular releases allows you to reach your customer first with new innovation and offerings before your competitors do.

Reduced Risk: The small incremental delivery of Agile enable the development team to respond to any issues as early as possible thereby averting drastic changes that might have a huge effect on the project budget and timeline.

Cost and Schedule Management: The cost and schedule of the project are estimated based on the number of sprints projected. Since the duration of each sprint is fixed, the cost and amount of work required can be accurately predicted and clients can also make a more informed decision on the priority of the features.

Quality Improvement: Perhaps one of the biggest benefit compare to other development methods, Agile improves the overall quality of the product. Agile conducts regular testing during it's development sprint to identify and fixed any discrepancies immediately.

Grab Case Study (Coming Soon):

Equipping the team in Grab with agile mindset

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