I wonder about a small business retirement plan

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Whats Hard about Agile? November, 2006
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Who are we?

• Key
• 1000 branches
• 90B assets
• 20,000 associates across 14 states and Europe
• Key Technology Services
• 1500 associates across 2 major domestic
  development centers and 3 offshore centers
• Enterprise Technology Development
• 140M development budget
• 1000 developers
• 800 apps (20 mainframe/80 distributed)
• Near 100 debt

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Specific Challenges to Key

• Because were a bank
• Much of our competitive advantage comes from time
  to market on software
• Security, Reliability, Accuracy are pretty
  important
• Because we have many businesses
• Were attempting to move culture across many
  diverse groups
• Because were regulated
• We still need to comply with the rules
  established by FBR, OCC, SEC, etc.

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Where we were

• Punish failures as opposed to rewarding successes
• Command/Control culture
• Strong centralized PMO
• Waterfall RUP
• CMM 3ish
• Specialized skills/buy shop
• Highly matrixed organization
• Functional requirements
• Ball over the wall mentality
• Focus on business cases ? commitments
• Commitments ? analysis paralysis

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Keys approach

• Introduce the concepts to the entire organization
• Sell the idea to clients first
• Change success criteria to making customers happy
  by accelerating business value
• Get to the strategy table
• Look for leverage, not incremental value
• People over process software development is not
  a technology problem
• Coach, dont train
• No rollouts inside out implementation
• Let teams make the decisions
• Discourage the obedient mind set
• Focus on effectiveness, not efficiency

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What we did

• Disband the PMO and eliminate time cards
• Eliminate the centralized testing team - Holding
  teams accountable for their own quality
• Externally train (CSM) a few folks to be coaches
  - Provide Internal Coaching and Training
  (Jumpstarts, Overviews and Scrum Master)
• Create agile enablement teams reduce systemic
  overhead
• Build Team Space
• Work with dock teams
• Train and coach Product owners
• Host internal discussion groups
• Created sandbox environments and try without
  penalty policy
• Mainframe teams incorporating scrum practices
• Get external help (practices, coaching)

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Agile is a big change

• Management will resist
• Clients are skeptical
• Some like throwing things over the wall
• Some dont want to commit the time and effort
• Some like the Project Commitment model
• Getting to dedicated teams is hard
• 30 Day Waterfalls are hard to avoid
• Vertical development is counter-intuitive
• Getting to generalists is hard
• Team accountability is new and difficult for many
• Tested, documented, working code in 30 days is a
  difficult discipline

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Things we should have done earlier

• Train managers to support teams
• Recognized that the first team is easy
• Make it clear that we expect technical leadership
• Thought about the problem where clients want
  waterfall, or just dont do projects
• Included teamwork training from the outset
• Put disciplines in place for multi-team projects