Agile Development: Tales from the Sprint!

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Agile Development Tales from the Sprint!
How one IT group went from swimming to sprinting
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Topics

• About Ferguson
• Why We Changed
• How We Transitioned
• Team/Project Selection
• Ferguson Agile
• Continuing Challenges
• What We Achieved
• Parting Thoughts
• Q/A

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who is Ferguson

• Largest distributor of residential and commercial
  plumbing supplies and pipe, valves and fittings
  (PVF) in the U.S.
• 11.6B sales in fiscal year 2014
• More than 20,000 knowledgeable associates
• Ferguson is a subsidiary of Wolseley, plc
• Markets we serve
• Commercial Plumbing Mechanical
• Residential Plumbing
• Waterworks
• HVAC
• Industrial
• MRO
• Fire and Fabrication

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DCs and Branches

• 1400 branch locations
• 10 regional DCs, 3 pipe yards
• 6 million square feet of storage
• 463M inventory investment
• 7.5 average turns
• 96 average fill rate
• 98,000 lines picked daily
• 95,000 unique SKUs
• Same day or next day service
• Daily departures
• 158 full truckloads
• 7,600 parcels

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wHere we are

• Counters
• Showrooms
• Distribution Centers

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Ferguson IT

• Over 400 IT Associates
• 170 focused on business apps
• 200 focused on operations
• Various on/offshore associates
• IT Work
• Ecommerce(B2B,B2C, EDI)
• ERP Systems Enhancements
• Warehouse Management
• Business Intelligence
• 3rd Party software integrations
• Data conversions acquisitions
• Software/Hardware upgrades
• Emerging technologies
• Networking
• Desktop computing
• Keeping the lights on work

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About Me

• I Am
• 19 years in IT
• 11 years Project/Portfolio/Program Manager
• 5 years Business Analyst
• 3 years Agile Implementations Manager
• 10 years in Wholesale Distribution Management
  Operations
• I Am Not
• A hired gun/agile expert/agile consultant
• Selling a book or offering my services for a fee
• Telling you what worked for us will work for you

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swimming TO SPRINTING Why?
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Ferguson IT Pre-Agile
Our Challenges
Waterfall

• Business partners felt IT was slow to deliver
• Final product did not meet business needs
• Our customer saw product very late
• Changes were costly
• Teams were slow to respond to change
• Identified problems late in the project
• Needed to reduce admin overhead
• Customer not really engaged with team
• Slow to deliver value
• Teams lacked empowerment and ownership

Project Initiation
Requirements
Design
Build
Test
Deployment
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swimming TO SPRINTING transition
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Agile Transition
3-12 months
2-3 months
1 year
I wish we had picked the initial team first
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Agile Transition Formed Transition Team

• Transition Team
• Senior IT Leadership
• PM Group Manager(Me)
• Agile Consultant
• Key Business Partners
• Initial project team

• Key Deliverables
• Which Agile Methodology
• Initial Process Decisions
• Initial Team Selection
• Types of Projects
• Communication
• Training and Education
• Organizational Changes
• Culture

The transition team must be disciplined, unified,
empowered and resolute in the implementation
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Agile TransitionEarly Education

• Intro to Agile Class
• Certified Scrum Master Training
• Reading and Research
• Agile Alliance
• Scrum Alliance
• Scruminc
• Mountain Goat Software
• Agile Samurai
• Essential Scrum A Practical Guide to the Most
  Popular Agile Process
• Scrum Master(Contractor)

An experienced Scrum Coach will help with
learning and understanding best practices and
help with the transition
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Agile Transitionearly Decisions

• Selecting the right transition team members
• Empowering the transition team to implement the
  necessary changes
• Selecting an agile consultant and dedicated scrum
  masters
• Selected Scrum as our initial agile methodology
• Getting executive buy in early
• Co-located team members, fully dedicated
• Establishing selection criteria and determining
  rollout plan
• Organization, personal, process change management
  communication

I wish we had investigated Kanban in more detail
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swimming TO SPRINTING Initial selection
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Initial Selection

• Established selection criteria(20 items in total)
• Evaluated each team and project for suitability
  using selection criteria
• 17 projects were initially considered
• Team composition, stakeholder engagement,
  associates personalities
• Discussions held with key IT execs to review the
  top 3 candidates
• Once we had our finalists, we discussed changes
  with key stakeholder

Avoid using the word Pilot, Test, Proof of
Concept or any other terms that might denote this
is not a permanent change to the way IT is going
to do business in the future. It will change
your associates behavior
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Selection Criteria
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swimming TO SPRINTING Ferguson Agile
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Why Scrum?
Evaluated many flavors of agile, eventually chose
scrum

• Well documented with lots of resources available
• Fit our culture
• Scales well based on needs of the project
• Answers the question When will it be delivered?
• Basic concepts easy to understand
• 2 week sprints are more productive, 4 weeks yield
  higher quality

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What is Scrum?

• Scrum is
• Well defined requirements
• Standardized process
• Flexible to future changes
• Team led
• Well coordinated
• Collaborative
• Well documented
• Agreed to direction
• Feature driven
• Small deliverables
• Self sufficient teams
• Scrum is Not
• Undocumented
• No requirements
• Meeting Free
• Command and Control

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Impact to IT
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Rollout
I think we could have gone faster
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swimming TO SPRINTING Achievements
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Agile Achievements
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Benefits
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swimming TO SPRINTING Challenges
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Continuing Challenges

• Old guard wanting to maintain the status quo
• Line managers want to retain control
• Offshore team members
• 3rd partys running waterfall projects using
  agile teams
• Some associates may not be a good fit for an
  agile organization
• Associate empowerment and engagement
• People and non-agile processes have to adjust to
  a faster pace
• There is a lot of bad agile information on the
  internet
• Breaking down the project work into smaller
  chunks
• Dedicating resources to scrum teams
• Finding the right scrum coach
• Command and control types are bad for scrum teams

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swimming TO SPRINTING Parting Thoughts
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Parting Thoughts

• An agile transition is a pretty disruptive and
  emotional journey
• Protect your teams and make them feel safe
• Pace of work is extremely fast
• Over communicate and sell the agile benefits to
  everyone, often
• Teams need time to adjust and grow their agile
  skill set
• You will wreck early sprints, its okay, set
  expectations accordingly
• Maintain a strong agile discipline early on in
  the transition, it is too easy to go back to old
  ways of doing things
• Teams need to be focused and dedicated
• Teams need to be self sufficient and balanced
  across resources

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Despite all the hard work,
tough times and gnashing of teeth, We would do
it again!
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