Strength & Weaknesses of Agile Frameworks

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I have to reply for two person’s post. Just need to give your opinion based on their post.

Person 1 post (metta):

Strength & Weaknesses of Agile Frameworks

There are different scaling agile framework organizations can adopt, such as Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Scrum of Scrum (SoS), Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), etc. This posting discusses an organization that uses SAFe scaling framework implementation, the challenges of the adoption, and lessons learned for successful implementation. According to Kalenda, Hyna, & Rossi (2018) SAFe is considered as a more mature scaling agile framework with about a 28% adoption rate. Three training steps need to be implemented when adopting SAFe, train implementer & change agents, and train all executives/managers/leaders, train teams/release training for SAFe (Paasivaara, 2017).

The framework has resources that organizations can use for adoption. This posting describes a case study by Paasivaara (2017) about Comptel’s journey in adopting SAFe. Comptel is a Finland-based global telecommunication company purchased by Nokia in 2017. Their product is mobile usage data processing. The case study discusses Comptel adoption in its two business lines. In 2008 the software development department change from the traditional project model to Scrum, however, the product management department did not change the model to an agile framework. The situation created challenges such as lack of collaboration between software development and product managers because the product managers are following their road map, meanwhile, the software development department is following the agile framework (they made changes based on customer inputs, timelines can be changed due to feedback, etc.); hence, the product managers have surprises when it is close to product release. Accordingly, the product managers for the two business lines (case 1 and case 2) decided to adopt SAFe independently. In 2015 the two business lines with a total of 14 teams reside in Finland, Russia, Malaysia, Norway, UK, and Bulgaria adopted SAFe framework. Moreover, the company hopes that adoption can help them adapt faster to market change. The first case made the change in early 2015 and the second case made the change in last 2015.

Two things happened because of the adoption, the introduction of the increment planning (PI) event and collaboration and communication change between the development teams and between product managers and product owners. The goals for the PI planning to plan the next ten weeks with all stakeholders in the business lines to prioritize works, to create visibility across teams and products, and to resolve dependencies across teams. The PI started with the business visions and architecture plan, then the product managers present their plan, team-specific plan (with Scrum of Scrum meeting model) to check the status and coordinate plans. The PI planning ends with a site-specific retrospective meeting on the previous PI.

Implementation of the adoption on the first case had a lot of challenges such as people’s resistance to change because there was no clear communication about the new model before the change begins. The organization learned from the challenges in case one when they are implementing the change in case two by

• implement SAFe training for all teams and managers a few months before the adoption,
• communicate the urgency to change to the SAFe model and get people buy-in to the new model,
• hired change agents as a full-time employee,
• invite an external SAFe coach at the beginning of the adoption and reinvite the coach half a year after the adoption to give feedback to stakeholders, the coach trains, advice, and supports the implementation,
• give better information upfront regarding the PI and what is going to happen and the expectations during the event,
• create a closing the loop action plans for improvement feedback and monitor the implementation of the action plans

Because of the scale agile adoption, project managers in Comptel changed their mindset from long-term planning to short-term planning and they prioritize by the business lines instead of by projects. Seventy percent of people within case two are satisfied with SAFe. The company adopted the team level and combined portfolio/program level. Furthermore, the case study shows that piloting the adoption is deemed to be a better model when adopting a scale agile framework.

References

Person 2 post ( Gregory) :

The Envision-Speculate-Explore-Adapt-Close Agile delivery framework

Clearly, it is obvious that guiding principle is necessary to understand the notion of responding to change over following a plan because most often embracing change is foreign to many organizations so it tends to be challenging. There are five types of agile project management are:

1. Envision: this determine the product vision and project scope, the project community, and how the team will work together. However, the Envision phase creates a vision for the customers and the project team that covers what, who, and how. Also, it reflects that absent of a vision, the remaining activities in getting a project off the ground are wasted effort. In project or business-speak, vision is the “critical success factor” early in a project. Firstly, we need to envision what to deliver—a vision of the product and the scope of the project. Secondly, we need to envision who will be involved—the community of customers, product managers, project team members, and stakeholders. And third, the project team members must envision how they intend to work together. All envision focus on customer, competent employee, and logistic delivery of the product to customer.

2. Speculate observation: this develops a feature-based release, milestone, and iteration plan to deliver on the vision. people believe when they plan that they introduce certainty, which is far from the truth. This stage focus on What they introduce against their performance which can be determine through customer satisfaction level. Then, when the gauge does not reflect reality, they fail to re-plan. The word “speculates” first calls to mind an image of reckless risk taking, but actually the dictionary definition is “to conjecture something based on incomplete facts or information,” which is exactly what happens during this phase. The word “plan” has come to connote certainty and prediction, while the more useful definition of plan, for exploratory projects at least, is speculating or hypothesizing based on incomplete information.

APM consists more of envisioning and exploring than planning and doing—it forces us to confront the reality of today’s precarious business environment and highly volatile product development environment. The Speculate phase, which is an extension of and interactive with the Envision phase consist of Gathering the initial broad requirements for the product and defining the workload as a list of product features. Furthermore, creating a delivery plan (release, milestones, and iterations) that includes schedule and resource allocations for those features, incorporating risk mitigation strategies into the plan, estimating project costs, generating other required administrative and financial information.

3. Explore: deliver tested features in a short timeframe, constantly seeking to reduce the risk and uncertainty of the project. The Explore phase delivers product features from a project management perspective there are three critical activity areas during this phase. The first is delivering planned features by managing the workload and using appropriate technical practices and risk mitigation strategies. In addition, the second thing is creating a collaborative, self-organizing project community, which is everyone’s responsibility but is facilitated by the project manager. Also, the third activity is managing the team’s interactions with customers, product management, and other stakeholders

4. Adapt: review the delivered results, the current situation, and the team’s performance, and adapt as necessary. Adapt Control and correction are common terms applied to this lifecycle phase. Plans are made, results are monitored, and corrections are made—implying that the plans were right and the actual results, if different from the plan, then it is wrong. “Adapt” implies modification or change rather than success or failure. In projects guided by the philosophy that responding to change is more important than following a plan, attributing failure to variation from the plan isn’t productive.

A purely ad hoc process fails to learn from its mistakes, whereas the incorporation and retention of lessons learned are key pieces of APM. However, After the Envision phase, the loop will generally be Speculate, Explore and Adapt, with each iteration successively refining the product. Therefore, periodically revisiting the Envision phase may be necessary as the team gathers new information. In the Adapt phase the results are reviewed from customer, technical, people and process performance, and project status perspectives. The analysis looks at actual performance versus planned. Additionally, it considers actual versus a revised outlook on the project given up-to-the-minute information.

5. Close: conclude the project, pass along key learnings, and celebrate. Technically, close Projects are partially defined by the presence of both a beginning and an end. Many organizations fail to identify a project’s end point, often causing perception problems among customers. Projects should end—with a celebration. The key objective of the Close phase, and the “mini” close at the end of each iteration, is learning and incorporating that learning into the work of the next iteration or passing it on to the next project team. After the project close then project team are disbanded.