Learning Pays Off

There is no entry in this blog since December ’09 not because I was lazy, but because so many things have happened in context of our Agile Transformation, that I decided to wait and organize my thoughts.

In February I’ve held a 2-day offsite workshop for the entire Product Development team. It was a workshop and not a mere PowerPoint overview of Agile practices. We’ve analyzed our challenges, our vision and goals, learned through games and read articles about Agile adoption. We’ve discussed success factors, success criteria and recipe for failure. This was my first public speaking in front of such a large audience for such long period of time, so as much as it was educational for the entire group it was quite an experience for me as well.

It was extremely beneficial to walk the entire team through the vision and the goals and showing how with help of Agile we can get there. Once the group understood that we are not doing Agile for the sake of “doing it”, but Agile is just a means to an end everyone became more comfortable with the idea of adopting it. Especially it resonated with senior engineers, some of whom had pretty bad experiences with Agile in previous jobs, where Agile was shoved down the throat by the management. Everyone has appreciated the fact that we’ve learned Agile for almost 12 months and didn’t want to rush with it right after reading a book.

Armed with the basic understanding of where we are marching to and how will we get there we had additional onsite education for Engineering Management, Product Management and key engineers on the roles of Scrum Master and Product Owner. These were lead by external coaches. Not to forget about our offshore team in Ukraine, we also made sure to organize SCRUM training over there (some delivered by me, and some by local coaches).

As our major release was coming to an end we were at the right place as organization to begin our 1^st pilot project.