We are from Large Indian IT Services organisation where most of the projects follow traditional/waterfall ways of working and the mindset of the senior management is also used to this way of working for all project types (Application Maintenance, Minor Enhancement, Bug Fixing and L3 Analysis space), while these methods have their own shortfalls and projects suffer because of the methodology, many leaders still believe that by following tradtional process their problems would be solved. Through this experience report, we would like to share how Visualisation and Agile Practices rescued the waterfall project from depleting Customer Confidence and Quality of Service Delivery.

The Project team of 9 members distributed at onsite and offshore was involved in maintenance / enhancement type of work for a large Investment Bank with several new features being implemented as change requests. Team’s responsibility starts from Analysis to Deployment into Production for the work comes in ad-hoc manner. The issues and challenges by project teams were

• Longer duration to complete the change requests and ensuring an on-time delivery
• Low Customer Satisfaction and Quality of Deliverable.
• Proactively manage application issues despite higher experience of team.
• Low employee morale
• Lack of senior management participation and constant fire fighting with the customer.

Project team focused on 3 areas

Business/Client IT team

• Prioritize the change requests by highest business/end user value (Input Cadence)

• ‘Drive’ the development efforts to incrementally deliver

Teams

• Focused on speed in delivering change request by eliminating waste

• Focused on enhancing knowledge sharing by Collaboration using Visualisation Boards and daily stand up meeting

• Focus to Deliver right at First Time

Management

• Focus on the value stream (cycle time)

• ‘Drive’ Continuous Improvement (Kaizen)

• Manage impediments , making blockers visible

Within 3 months of time after team started adopting the Visualisation and Agile practices the teams and senior management could see the improvement in the areas of 

1. Increase in Balance Score Card scores from 4 to 6.5 and many areas scored 7.0/7.0
2. Productivity improvement by 25%

We are developing medical imaging and workflow software in an agile way with development teams distributed to several countries. One of the major challenges is how to set up and communicate within the Product Owner team. There we have to deal with the distribution, e.g., have the Product Owner either onsite with her peers or with her Scrum team, travelling, or with proxy. We need people who are good in two different fields of knowledge: medical and software development. As a third issues, the environment of the customers may be different in different countries.

We have ramped up local Product Owners in different countries, have found local collaboration customers, and have developed a set of communication channels and workshops how to synchronize Product Owners in the team, share a common vision and backlog with their Scrum teams, and collaborate with customers locally and globally.

So your project is just getting started. Or maybe you're just about to embark on a new release. Or new members just joined the team. What now?

In either situation, your project will have a lot of energy and attention right now. But at the same time, there's probably a lot of uncertainty about what to do first. Many projects waste this valuable time without a clear plan or purpose. In Exilesoft, we have refined activities to deal with these problems, even with the additional constraint that the team may be distributed geographically.

In this workshop, we share a typical plan of what activities to do every day in the first weeks together with a set of activities which yeld tangible results in terms of team building, vision, architecture and a coherent working system in a minimum of time. Participants will get a chance to practice the skills as well with several interactive exercises.