Suresh Ramanathan is a Wipro Certified Lean Coach and Certified Scrum Master with more than 16 years of experience. He has coached more than 150 continuous improvement projects and served in consulting assignments in Europe and America for leading Financial Services clients. He has a M.B.A. in Financial Management and is a B.E. in Industrial Engineering
One of the fundamental reasons why management teams are eager to adopt Agile in large programs these days, is the discomfort that is caused by long gestation periods before anything tangible is delivered to the Business, and the risks associated with it. They hope that the practice of the principle of “Frequent Delivery of valuable working software” that Agile espouses will help them address these risks. However, in the Agile Transformation of such programs, a key challenge that emerges is in synchronising the output of the various teams in the program in order to deliver working software every sprint. This problem gets especially compounded with geographically dispersed teams.
The following experience report shares the experience in guiding an agile transformation engagement for a program involving geographically dispersed teams of a global BFSI player. The work products went through three stages – creation of the technical workflows required for the desired services by the product owner & SMEs, completion of proofs of concept / technical feasibility of core components of the services, and lastly the actual development work including user interfaces. The development teams were spread across two locations and SME’s were in two different locations. Due to pressures from business, the first priority for the program was to start delivering value by means of usable functionality available to the end users.
Kanban as well as Scrum was used in the transformed process to ensure that smooth and regular flow of functionality was delivered at the end of every sprint. The aspects of Kanban used were Pull based scheduling across the various stages, Making the work Visual and Limiting the number of services which were WIP. How these elements of Kanban drove the Synchronization efforts as well as overall governance betweeen teams, while the teams used Scrum for managing engineering activities within the team, will be detailed in the presentation. How this approach can be extended for better management of MMF’s/ Epics will also be explained.
