Track: Agile and DevOps

Scaled Agile implementation – Lesson Learned, Path Forward – Millane

As with many IT organizations in companies started in the last century, Intel IT had a strong legacy of waterfall Program and Project management, small pockets of Agile development teams and emerging DevOps practices with mixed results and limited visibility.

Starting in 2019, Intel IT generally, and the Supply Chain IT organization specifically, started our Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) journey amidst a broader Digital Transformation initiative.

As we progressed through identifying our Development value streams, launching our 8 Agile Release Trains as part of Essential SAFe and then implementation of Lean Portfolio principles, we have observed and learned many benefits of the Scaled Agile Framework. Some of the primary benefits were:

  • Stabilization of our Operational Support and SLA commitments
  • More predictable value and project delivery
  • Improved our organization’s focus on tech debt elimination and end of life strategies
  • Improved our stakeholder alignment, engagement, and transparency
  • SAFe became our stabilizing structure amidst multiple organizational changes

In our large, complex enterprise environment, we have also seen its limitations and the need for adaptations or accommodations such as:

  • Hybrid lifecycle models for complex initiatives
  • Integration of our Scaled Agile Portfolio and Execution model into a broader organization that has mixed methodologies
  • Consistent cadence of Stakeholder Prioritization signal at the Portfolio level
  • Necessity of Portfolio wide integrated planning alignment on quarterly cadence

Finally, there are certain realities that no methodology will resolve – as in there is always significantly more demand than capacity – but the nature or how that conversation in a Scaled Agile implementations changes.

Attendees should come away with:

  1. Successful approaches to establishing and reviewing SAFe Development Value Streams
  2. Key success factors for Agile Release Train (ART) structure, roles, and processes such as Program Increment Planning, Innovation & Planning and Retrospectives
  3. Stakeholder Management: How does SAFe change the stakeholder dynamic
  4. Portfolio management learnings, key principles and metrics: Strategy & Investments, Governance, Operations – and the metrics leveraged to demonstrate Business Value and Operational Excellence

PMI Talent Triangle: Technical Project Management (Ways of Working)

Demonstrating Product Success in an Agile Project Environment – Hostetter

Have you ever struggled with demonstrating and communicating product success to your Agile project stakeholders? If yes, then let me show you how to better connect with your stakeholders through the development and use of performance measures.

As project managers, we need to demonstrate to our stakeholders how well our agile projects are doing and there are some good project measures currently in place, such as burndown and agile velocity, to describe how the agile project is doing. What is not so accessible, are the measures that demonstrate how well your project is producing a product that meets customer requirements and expectations.

Within an agile environment, projects are developing new and innovative products and these products need measures as unique as they are. To do this, a project manager will need a process to help them to identify and develop these meaningful and unique measures. This paper and presentation can help you in this process by showing how to:

  • Transform your project’s customer requirements and success criteria into meaningful, quantitative, product performance measures
  • Invoke meaningful discussions to analyze your projects incremental achievements for measure potential
  • Identify data sources with the potential to show that you are producing the product your customer wants
  • Find and utilize partners for producing important measures of product performance

PMI Talent Triangle: Strategic and Business Management (Business Acumen)