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Progressive Indian companies as well as MNCs are always in a quest for coming up with innovative products in the market to stay ahead of competition with time-to-market as one of the biggest constraints. Such organization’s product development teams are generally associated with big size, cross-functional and across geography teams. Their customer’s expectations are ever increasing. They demand business centric products within allocated budget without compromising on quality.
This calls for Agile development methodology that can add value to the business quickly, understand customer’s expectation better and manage projects that have long development cycles akin to lesser control.
Many big corporates in India have started adopting Agile after learning the benefits from their counterparts in developed economies. More and more companies are now looking towards taking advantage of Lean principles for cutting waste and using Agile for managing project efforts for maximum return on investment.
Xebia has been one of the early adopters of this methodology. We work with Agile though leaders of the world like Jeff Sutherland (Co-creator of scrum), Marry Poppendick, Pete Deemer to envisage mature practices in our scrum projects.
Whether your organization has just begun or has been following Agile for some time, Xebia can help you adopt Agile to the next level. Factors like the organizational structure, the nature of business and the existing culture and skills of the employees serve as the key inputs to determine the approach for adoption of Agile methodology. There is no single recipe that fits for all organizations.
Xebia consultants handle Agile transformation in a professional manner. We tailor our coaching and training according to the audience in the customer organisation. Our Agile transformation approach includes initial assessment, starting initial pilot project with a Scrum team and coaching managers and team members. Following steps have been described in detail:
The initial engagement will provide practical answers to the questions that IT executives and dev managers of the organisation may be asking themselves as they consider transitioning to Agile. Xebia will provide insights into how to translate Agile principles from theory into practice for their organisation.
At the end of this exercise the stake holders would be able to understand how Agile adoption could really make a tangible difference to their bottom line and they would be in a more confident position to take the decision to further invest time and effort for the same. Going forward, the next step is introduction of scrum.
Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for Agile software development. It is about teams producing result in Agile way. Scrum, if followed properly, will help to expose the failure much early in the process. Hence it is very important that there is a very clear understanding of scrum. This can only be achieved by solid training and coaching. Xebia can help the team to get an in depth understanding of scrum. The next step is creation of scrum teams.
It is time to transition traditional development team roles – managers, chief programmers, product managers to the Agile model. To follow scrum successfully each team has a Product Owner, a Scrum Master and a team of developers and testers.
Transition to new roles requires special trainings for each role. Developers and testers need to acquire in depth understanding of the software engineering practises, design principles and knowledge of various diversified tools that help to speed up software development and testing. Without these skills, it would be very hard to get the true business benefits.
Xebia coaches will help to acquire skills related to these new specialised roles. The coaches will help the Scrum Masters to become Certified Scrum Master and the Product Owners to become Certified Scrum Product Owner so that they can perform their roles much better.
Managers play a very important role in the organisation. In an Agile atmosphere, the role of a traditional manager becomes even more dynamic. A successful Agile manager has to be very open minded and a very patient listener. He needs to have diversified skills to remove impediments faced by the Scrum Masters and the Product Owners, developers and testers at the organisational levels.
Manager resistance can be a major restraining force and risk the success of the Agile transformation. Taking the needs of managers into account and arranging support for them will increase the changes of success.
Xebia coaches help to change the mindset of the managers by removing the myth that Agile processes do not require managers. They make the managers an active actor during the Agile adoption phase rather than allowing them to be just passive observers during the transformation exercise.
