Carsten R. Jakobsen & Anne Abell ———— For the past three years, 100 people in an internal IT function have been fighting to transform their organization from being traditional and hierarchical to becoming agile. This is the story of an inviting rather than prescriptive transformation, and of why this approach initially failed due to lack of a trustworthy ‘why’ in a department heavily influenced by an ITIL mindset and an unclear mandate for leader roles. It is a story of sources of resistance and of how to redefine culture and management structure to support the change towards reinventing themselves as ‘a development organization’ that can deliver relevant infrastructure products in the cloud at high speed. The organization has set out on a 10-year journey and has decided radically to eliminate the traditional line manager role and replaced it with Scrum roles (PO and SM) as well as an additional role for ‘handling people’. Most importantly, however, it is a story with an unexpected happy ending, as it is the story of how the organization still has long way to go on to become truly agile but also about how the change prepared the organization for the unforeseeable: Covid-19.

Jakobsen, Carsten & Abell, Anne. (2020). Interventions with an IT-department – How we rallied the Kingdom no one had expected. Proceedings – XP2020 Conference.

See also the video of the presentation here.

Carsten R. Jakobsen & Jeff Sutherland ———— Systematic is a CMMI level 5 company, where the adoption of Lean led to a unique way of working based on synergies between CMMI, Lean, Scrum and other agile practices. Lean provides the principles and values needed for high performance teams and organizations, as demonstrated by Toyota for more than 50 years. CMMI provides the process descriptions and support for what disciplines to consider in order to be successful. Agile approaches like Scrum provides best practices and methods for working according to the values of Lean and adopting change as it occurs. Lean, CMMI and Scrum are strong by themselves, but they can be combined to amplify each other – and that is what Systematic has done. The experiences from combining Lean, CMMI and Scrum have led Systematic to identify examples of explicit guidance from CMMI that help to execute Scrum activities even better. These activities can be implemented based on Lean values and principles and by doing so Scrum can be augmented and matured to ensure that even larger and more complex projects in the future can and will benefit from Scrum.

Jakobsen, Carsten & Sutherland, Jeff. (2009). Mature Scrum at Systematic.

Carsten R. Jakobsen & Kent Johnson ———— Systematic is an agile company working at CMMI level 5, where the default way of working is based on Scrum and story based early testing development. Solid experiences in combining CMMI with Scrum and story based development, has shown that the mix provides strong synergies [2] and insights into what CMMI practices fit and amplify the execution of Scrum and story based early testing development This paper presents specifically how agile methods like Scrum are successfully combined with CMMI. CMMI provides solid support for what disciplines to consider. When applied the disciplines create a focus on important aspects of agile methods that perhaps are not normally elaborated, for example how to ensure a proper quality of a product backlog or how to ensure a proper “production line” for the project. This guidance may not be needed for small agile projects, but as the agile movement continues to grow, and is used for larger and more complex projects, agile projects will need to address these issues related to increased size and complexity. The experiences from combining CMMI and Scrum have led Systematic to identify examples of explicit guidance from CMMI that help to execute normal Scrum activities even better. These activities can be implemented in the spirit of the agile manifesto and principles and by doing so agile methods can be augmented and matured to ensure that even larger and more complex projects in the future can and will benefit from agile – with a twist of CMMI.

Jakobsen, Carsten & Johnson, Kent. (2008). Mature agile with a twist of CMMI. Proceedings – Agile 2008 Conference. 212-217. 10.1109/Agile.2008.10.