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.

Great teams make great products, but what fuels this greatness? It's the common understanding and passion for the product but more importantly the singularity of purpose and the feedback loop and how the users are responding to the teams work. 

The new world of product development is no longer about scope management and delivering the project on time and within budget but it's now more about hypothesis validation and learning from the users and their behaviors.

The dynamics of product development is changing.  As more and more organizations are moving towards maturing their agile software development approach the traditional barriers of roles are being broken creating new opportunities and fostering a shift in the mindset. Instead of being tied down to scope management and delivering the project on time, Agile teams are focused and inspired by hypothesis validation and learning from the users and their behaviors.

In this case study we will go over how a portfolio of 12 SCRUM Teams adopted a more outcome approach and how they shifted their mindset from project delivery in Agile way to adopting the Experiment-Measure-Learn-Repeat loop which plays a crucial role in teams overall motivation, performance and moved from being SCRUM Teams to "Product Teams".

We will also see how we experimented with different team formats and how exposing the team members to different events and user research changed the way they perceived the information of the problem they were solving via features and user stories.

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 structural rules and guidelines on how to adopt Scrum in large product development.

The Certified LeSS Practioner course is an in-depth course covering the LeSS principles, framework and rules, and guides. It provides essential information for adopting and improving LeSS to your product development group. The course contains an overview of LeSS, stories on LeSS adoptions, exercises and extensive LeSS Q&A to ensure we discuss the topics most of interest to the participants.

The Certified LeSS Practitioner course is for anyone who is involved a large agile adoption. Basic Scrum knowledge is expected and can be achieved by attending a Certified ScrumMaster or a Professional ScrumMaster course, or thoroughly reading Scrum introduction material such as the Scrum Primer and practicing Scrum.

The course is three days. The first day has the focus on the LeSS Overview, the LeSS Principles and organizational aspects. The second day focuses on managing the product development with Definition of Done, role of the Product Owner and how (line) managements role changes in LeSS. The last day focuses on how the different teams coordinate their work, how LeSS is adopted in organizations and the role of the ScrumMaster.

The word "DevOps-in-a-Box" has been deemed a misnomer , among the DevOps practitioner, thanks to the parody video from ScriptRock (my personal favourite ) and some active advocates of the same in our field. DevOps-in-a-box makes no practical sense just like Agile-in-a-box wont. You cant buy an appliance or a "box" which will make you / your enterprise  Agile or DevOps. Maybe CI/CD Tools-in-a-Box might make some sense considering some of the end to end tool chains and orchestration services that are offered as an appliance or as-a-service model.

During the various discussion on training & coaching for DevOps implementations, we realized that implementers & practioners need an simple environment to experiment and learn the concepts of DevOps not limiting to only the tools & tool-chains. We realized that this maybe a practical use case for DevOps-in-a-box i.e DevOps in a Box - a Training Environment. When we looked around for similar views and approaches we found the Calavera project by Charles T. Betz. The Calavera project creates a "skeletal" continuous delivery pipeline that can be experimented on a workstation using Vagrant and VM VirtualBox. Though it is primarily CD-tools-in-a-box ,it is an interesting way to experiment with your own pipeline. 

For our training needs , we wanted to explore methods of creating an environment where the aspects of tools , process and people enablement methods can be experimented. As a result of which , we set out to create the DevOps Experimental Learning Platform (DELP). Using the extensive experience Wipro has in the field Agile , CI-CD & DevOps we created various Devops-in-a-box models that can be stood up in a experimental environment to understand how the implementation was architected , what were the process models and the key people enablement factors that were used for the success. The Practitioner can compare their experimental implementation with the actual and understand the reason for the difference.

As part of this demonstration , i will walk you through key elements of the Platform , DevOps Implementation codification methods and a view of a live "Devops-in-a-box" use case.