Executive Leadership Challenges for Agile Adoption
Sun, 2009-03-01 23:58 — Min-Gu Lee
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Add to calendarLevel: Introductory
Agile Methodology has been widely accepted in the private sector for a number of years and has caught the attention of government program managers as a process for software development designed to make work more efficient. Chief Technology Officers (CTO) and Chief Architects of the Lockheed Martin programs will provide an overview of the challenges experienced by the program’s leadership when balancing between Agile and traditional methodologies used on Government programs.
Process/Mechanics
About the Program How did the teams feel? (7 minutes) What worked? (7 minutes) What did not work? (7 minutes) Leadership Lessons Learned (7 minutes) Agile Leadership Tools
Learning outcomes
- About the Program
- • $700M program with 40 individual projects. 200 - 250 people (Lockheed Martin) plus Contractor / Partner / Government People
- • Supporting U.S. Federal Government for environmental, scientific, administrative, and research systems engineering services
- • Government V Model
- • Government environment – plan-drive culture and large volume of documents
- • Distributed environments
- • Cross-agency and department coordination
- • Cross-contract coordination
- • Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) based rigorous existing processes. (Tailoring existing processes was the mandatory step for Agile adoption.)
- • Shared program resources (for example, testing team) with the availability constraints based on a serial/waterfall culture
- How did the teams feel?
- • I am interested, but I do not know what it is.
- • Isn’t it an iterative Rapid Application Development? It will not work for my project.
- • I would like to do it, but I have some other priorities.
- • I am doing Agile.
- What worked?
- • Lockheed Martin Corporate Agile Community of Interest (COI), Training, Webinars, and Book Clubs.
- • Building Partnership among Leadership
- • Applying selective Best Practices using Agile checklist and assessment form
- • Aligning Agile Best Practices with Government Agency and program’s Software Life Cycle Model
- • Adding Agile to the Performance Work Statement (PWS) and Proposal
- • Integrating Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) process for Agile Architecture
- What did not work?
- • Bottom-Up; Limited (then realized needed top-down as well)
- • Authentic Scrum or XP
- • Agile Adoption without Training in Software Engineering
- • Rapid Agile Adoption
- Leadership Lessons Learned
- • Measurable objectives of Agile adoption announced by leadership are important.
- • Agile Adoption is not only an opportunity (if the organization acts timely) but also a risk (if the organization does not act) for a plan-driven organization.
- • Different Agile Best Practices are needed for different technologies and solutions (that is, Java, .Net, ColdFusion, Ruby, Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS), Portal, Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Content Management, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and others)
- Agile Leadership Tools
- • Partnership among Leadership (Agile Alliance)
- • Tailored Program Agile Handbook based on a Corporate Agile Handbook (Similar to the Software Engineering Institute (SEI)-CMMI tailoring process)
- • Agile Best Practice Checklist (to evaluate SCRUM as process framework, XP as technical Best Practices, Scaling Agile and Government Agile Best Practices)
- • Agile Assessment Form
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