While the IT side of this F500 financial services client has been practicing agile development for years, the business side is still, in some cases, more waterfall and traditional in its approach to requirements and releases.  In this experience report, we will hear from Associate Vice President Charlie Kennedy of Nationwide Insurance on how we have accelerated business-side agility by:

• Re-organizing from functional silos to Product-Based Value-Stream Teams
• Redesigning the business requirements process to achieve a continuous flow of MMPs into the teams
• Utilization of Big-Room-Planning techniques to create alignment across a wide set of stakeholders and dependencies
• Design of a Product-Manager-to-Product-Owner fan-out concept to achieve omni-channel digital delivery
• Design of a portfolio-level visitation system to track the flow of MMPs across multiple investments simultaneously

You are adopting Agile practices throughout your organization, and you set up a shiny new set of tools to support it.  All of your teams have captured their backlog and are running their Sprints (Scrum) or continuous-flow (Kanban) process.  Great!  There is only one problem.  How can management see at a glance what is going on in each effort?

• How do we know if each effort is “on track” or headed for disaster?
• How do we know when we have capacity to take on new initiatives?
• If a new high priority/urgent initiative is proposed, how can we quickly see if it would impact other efforts at the same or higher business priority?
• If a new high priority/urgent initiative must be undertaken, how can we quickly analyze resources and schedules for what is happening currently, so we can do an impact analysis?
• How can we avoid getting bogged down in the day-to-day minutiae of user stories, story points, and bugs and quickly identify important blockers, major risks, or emerging trends that could have ripple effects?

Through a case study involving a $1B municipal government agency, we will describe the process of configuring a set of tools to feed a one-page dashboard displaying current and proposed initiatives – enabling management decision-making.  The tools include Atlassian JIRA, BitBucket, Bamboo, and LeanKit, but the lessons may be applied to other similar toolchains.   We analyze both the technical work involved, as well as the important process and cultural changes we had to make in order for this to happen.   All changes automatically roll up from the team level to the portfolio level, so that progress, blockages, and risks are always visible.   Senior management can drill down to get details if needed.

Perhaps “Agile PMO” is not an oxymoron, after all.

Going agile in the government is easy to say and hard to do. Teams and individuals prefer to stay apart and work on their own for weeks or months at a time. Documentation can quickly become more important than working software. Addressing the demands brought on by a change in administration, policy, or executive direction requires teams and individuals to start working together in order to succeed in their overall mission.

This experience report will discuss the benefits, challenges, and outcomes when implementing Kanban in a traditional waterfall and silo working environment. Techniques for creating a continuous change towards an agile way of working will be shared. Performance data from a two year Kanban initiative at the Department of Labor will be reviewed and discussed. Participants will walk away with a clear understanding of how Kanban can break down silos, improve the agility of a traditional waterfall and silo focused organization, and noticeably improve performance.

Running a small business is no small task. Financial management, sales, hiring, managing people, and supporting existing clients are just a handful of activities a small business might address in a single day. So what happens when you use the Kanban Method to manage your business?

I’ll share my experiences while training, coaching, and evolving a small business using the Kanban Method. You’ll see how the Method quickly surfaced issues, revealed hidden opportunities for innovation, and how the business is using the Method to mature the services they offer.