Lean coffee: Scaling Agile – 25 March at 18:00 GMT/19:00 CET

Our next #ScalingAgile#LeanCoffee is on 25 March at 18:00 GMT/19:00 CET.

With Simon Roberts and Carsten R. Jakobsen.

There is always a lively discussion on different aspects of scaling agile ways of working. It’s free to join, so why not bring your burning topic to the event? We’d love to have you there.

Secure your place here:
http://ow.ly/iIWG50DZUnL

Carsten and Simon look forward to you joining the discussion!

Article: Interventions with an IT-department – How we rallied the Kingdom no one had expected (2020)

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.

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Article: Lean as a Scrum Troubleshooter (2011)

Carsten R. Jakobsen & Tom Poppendieck ———— Systematic works at CMMI level 5 and uses Lean Software Development as a driver for optimizing software processes. Many of the optimizations described in this paper are the result of using A3 problem solving. What makes the Systematic experience unique, is the larger focus of the problem solving effort, at an organizational level, in which individual projects are used as experiments to try out countermeasures to address root causes. This is possible because Systematic, based on a CMMI focus, already employs a level of standard work across project and product engagements so that we can apply learning from an experiment on one project to future projects. Experience from the past five years has resulted in significant improvements to our processes including our Scrum implementation, and has revealed insight into five key measures to monitor projects. The experiences also show important lessons learned on how to combine team retrospective learning with organizational learning.

Jakobsen, Carsten & Poppendieck, Tom. (2011). Lean as a Scrum Troubleshooter. 168-174. 10.1109/AGILE.2011.11.

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Article: Mature Scrum at Systematic (2009)

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.

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Article: Scrum and CMMI – Going from Good to Great (2009)

Carsten R. Jakobsen & Jeff Sutherland ———— Projects combining agile methods with CMMI combine adaptability with predictability to better serve large customer needs. The introduction of Scrum at Systematic, a CMMI Level 5 company, doubled productivity and cut defects by 40% compared to waterfall projects in 2006 by focusing on early testing and time to fix builds. Systematic institutionalized Scrum across all projects and used data driven tools like story process efficiency to surface Product Backlog impediments. This allowed them to systematically develop a strategy for a second doubling in productivity. Two teams have achieved a sustainable quadrupling of productivity compared to waterfall projects. We discuss here the strategy to bring the entire company to that level. Our experiences shows that Scrum and CMMI together bring a more powerful combination of adaptability and predictability than either one alone and suggest how other companies can combine them to achieve Toyota level performance – 4 times the productivity and 12 times the quality of waterfall teams.

Jakobsen, Carsten & Sutherland, Jeff. (2009). Scrum and CMMI going from good to great. 333 – 337. 10.1109/AGILE.2009.31.

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Article: Mature agile with a twist of CMMI (2008)

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.

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Article: Scrum and CMMI level 5 (2008)

Jeff Sutherland, Carsten R. Jakobsen, and Kent Johnson ———— Projects combining agile methods with CMMI1 are more successful in producing higher quality software that more effectively meets customer needs at a faster pace. Systematic Software Engineering works at CMMI level 5 and uses Lean Software Development as a driver for optimizing software processes. Early pilot projects at Systematic showed productivity on Scrum teams almost twice that of traditional teams. Other projects demonstrated a story based test driven approach to software development reduced defects found during final test by 40%. We assert that Scrum and CMMI together bring a more powerful combination of adaptability and predictability than either one alone and suggest how other companies can combine them.

Sutherland, Jeff & Jakobsen, Carsten & Johnson, Kent. (2008). Scrum and CMMI Level 5: The Magic Potion for Code Warriors. 466 – 466. 10.1109/HICSS.2008.384.

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