Business-Driven IT-Wide Agile (Scrum) and Kanban (Lean) Implementation

An Action Guide for Business and IT Leaders

Andrew Thu Pham, David Khoi Pham

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781466578562
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Manufacturing
• Index: Business

Business-Driven IT-Wide Agile (Scrum) and Kanban (Lean) Implementation: An Action Guide for Business and IT Leaders explains how to increase IT delivery capabilities through the use of Agile and Kanban. Factoring in constant change, communication, a sense of urgency, clear and measurable goals, political realities, and infrastructure needs, it cove

Business Goals–Driven IT-wide Software Delivery Improvement Framework

II

We hope that if you read our book up to here, it would become obvious to you that Agile alone is not a panacea for everything. The same thing should be true of Kanban (and Lean), which, sometimes, may be best combined with Agile (or Scrum) to form a powerful solution to an organization’s needs.

Likewise, we hope that you have seen that implementing new processes with soft objectives alone will also lead to failure, as demonstrated in preliminary case study #3.

This is what has led us to come up with the business-driven process improvement framework, as described in this book, which, in our mind, can serve as a generic approach for a software delivery improvement program, whether the process you are looking at is Agile (XP and Scrum), Kanban (Lean), or a combination of the two.

Chapter 4

Seven-Step Software Delivery Improvement Framework

Unlike some of those fervent Agile proponents who think the Agile process is “the end all and be all” solution of our IT ills, our approach to IT process improvement is based not on some vague process improvement for the sake of process, but on an organization’s business needs and goals—the only condition for any process improvement effort to have a measurable and lasting success (see Figure 4.1).

Description

Step 1: Identify the Business Sponsor and Her or His Needs and Goals

As long as we recognize that the main objective in building software is to support a business, it will become obvious that for a software delivery improvement program to be successful, we have to link it to some specific business goals. This is the reason why the first step is to identify the owner of these business goals for whom you are supposed to implement this IT improvement effort.

Identify the Business Sponsor

Knowing whose business goals this IT effort is supposed to help achieve will help you identify the goals that will drive your improvement effort, as well as determine the metrics you should use to measure your achievement.

Figure 4.1 A seven-step software delivery improvement framework.

Identify Business Problems and Issues

Whether the idea to improve software delivery capability comes from within IT or from the business, it will always address some business problems and issues, which the business sponsor tries to solve.

For illustration purposes, examples of problems or issues that have to be corrected can be one of the following:

Complaint that software delivered does not meet requirements, to better serve the company’s customers

Complaint that the software delivered contains a very high number of bugs, which make the customers’ experience very unpleasant

Complaint that it takes too long to deliver software while the competitor usually brings out new software in half the time

Identifying specific problems like these will help identify business goals and their measurements that help lead the IT improvement effort, which we address later.

Identify Business and IT Goals

We will delve into more details later, but here we provide some examples of business goals from which we can deduct the IT goals for the improvement effort.

1. Business goal:

Increase the number of customers who visit our website by 5%.

IT goals:

It should take the customers less than 1 minute to register their information.

The number of bugs should be reduced by 50%.

2. Business goal:

Increase the number of newly registered customers by 3% every quarter.

IT goals:

Project deadline should be reduced by 10%.

Key features should be delivered 10% times faster.

Identify Measurements

From the previous list of goals, we can identify the following as their respective measurements:

Number of unused features by users

Variance in delivery timeline

Step 2: Perform Environment Boundary Identification and Assessment

Even though the title of this book mentions IT-wide improvement, this does not mean that the whole IT department is going to be the object of an immediate and big-bang rollout. Rather, what we have seen work in the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Jack Bergstrand
• Foreword by Adam Warner
• Preface: What Is This Book About?
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• SECTION I SETTING UP THE STAGE
• SECTION II BUSINESS GOALS–DRIVEN IT-WIDE SOFTWARE DELIVERY IMPROVEMENT FRAMEWORK
• SECTION III RETROSPECTIVES
• SECTION IV CASE STUDIES
• SECTION V APPENDICES
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index