About the company

Philips is a healthcare multinational company that focuses on building complete health care products and solutions for emerging markets, in addition to developing solutions and products for global markets, across the three sectors Healthcare, Lighting and Lifestyle. Using the expertise of its nearly 2000 engineers in Bangalore and aligning the marketing and sales teams the campus is responsible for creating and rolling out a complete set of products that include a whole host of solutions for global customers. It also contributes to global solutions in critical health care component development for connected consumer devices and renewable energy.

Executive Summary

Beginning of 2014, an external survey brought out the issues wrt time to market and code quality. Taking the survey results positively, the Leadership embarked on an Agile/SAFe journey with pilot projects. The results were amazing and with the currently learning from the pilots, the organization is running 25+ deployments within. The journey has started and Agile release trains are delivering periodic value to our customers at defined frequencies.

Background Objective/Challenge

Product quality, consistent & predictive delivery and quicker time to market are the key challenges the organization is trying to address today. Continuous Innovation is constrained due to the above issues and hence there is need to find a new way of product development which can meet the dynamic business needs, foster people engagement and deliver meaningful products to the world.

Target

ScaledAgile has been used as a framework for product development across the organization global. The whole organization is undergoing a transformation from waterfall way of working to the SAFe agile way of working and roadmap is till 2019.

Agile Initiative

The Framework used for the transformation can be summarized into 4 major steps

1. Develop products in the Agile way with focus on Basic Agile practices (Scrum)
2. Establish Product Ownership with focus on Enabling Scaling aspects (SAFe practices)
3. Establish a release pipeline with continuous integration (supported by Automation)
4. Adopt a DevOps Culture with focus on Continuous delivery (to production environment)

This includes a comprehensive diagnosis of the various business processes, agile practices and behavior, engineering practices, delivery maturity and recommendations for the transition. A coaching and tooling plan is also an outcome of the diagnostics.

 Measurable Impact

• Predictable Releases to customers (hitting the market with features every three months with features and business criticial bugs with less than 2 weeks with all the regulatory compliance)
• Capitalization
• Feature planned vs Feature delivered per program increment > 80%lose
• Defect reduction co t 45%
• Team velocity – Baseline vs actual.
• Very high sense of ownership and high levels of engagement

Transformation team Profile

Global team

• Agile Capability program manager -1 FTE
• Agile Deployment Program Management – 1 FTE
• Communication expert – 1 FTE (Today we are 0/1)
• Coordination - 1 FTE
• Enterprise Agile Coaches – 16 (Today we are 9 /16)

I want to be controversial for a moment and propose an end to IT projects, project management & project managers. I propose that the entire project process is flawed from the start for one simple reason. If you need to run a project, you've already failed.

By definition, an IT project is a temporary structure to govern and deliver a complex change (such as a new product or platform) into an organisation. However, to be truly competitive, an organisation needs to be able to deliver a continuous stream of change. Managed properly, this negates the need for a project and the associated cost overheads.

This is fundamentally what #noprojects is. The approach, structure, tactics and techniques available to successfully deliver continuous change. At its core, #noprojects is predicated on the alignment of activities to outcomes, measured by value, constrained by guiding principles and supported by continuous delivery technologies.

This presentation will introduce you to #noprojects. You will learn how to define an outcome and create an Outcome Profile. You will also learn how to manage change within the context of an outcome through the Activity Canvas.

Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) is a framework for scaling agile development to multiple teams. LeSS builds on top of the Scrum principles such as empiricism, cross-functional self-managing teams and provides a framework for applying that at scale. It provides simple basic rules and guidelines on how to adopt Scrum in large product development.

In this tutorial, we focus on LeSS framework and see how you can scale Agile development to big organizations. We will start by looking at basic assumptions behind scaling and what different approaches there. Then we learn how LeSS deals with scaling in big groups and finally how LeSS can be adopted for existing organizations and what changes it bring in.

There is a lot of discussion around user stories, and it is probably one of the most frequently used words in any agile team. For something that is talked about so much in your team, and when the quality of understanding around the user story is directly proportional to creating a successful product, do you know how well your agile teams understand these user stories? What views do they have about these user stories, and what aspects of these user stories do they care about most?

In this session you will learn and experience three techniques to aid collaboration within your team members and learn to reach a common understanding of the product and user stories that everyone will support. These techniques include role playing in a very different way to help us explore how user stories can help team members see them from a perspective never thought of before.

This session you will learn and experience through three different exercises how to decipher information your team wants to develop a common understanding of the product and expectations from each other. This session is helpful to product owners, team members, scrum masters and leaders in any organization.