Implement Agile Practices That Work

Guide your organization through its Agile transformation journey.

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Your Challenge

Many Agile implementations fail due to the lack of experience and understanding of what Agile really is, and the problems it is trying to solve. When these projects fail, Agile often gets blamed for it.
The lack of management support, inflexible organizational culture, resistance from team members, and insufficient training are some of the biggest contributors to failed Agile practices.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Agile is first and foremost a cultural shift. Culture is often the biggest challenge to Agile implementation. Don’t take this as a sign that Agile is failing. Instead, consider it a lesson to bring forward improvement opportunities.
The Agile mindset must be created at every level of the organization. A top-down approach to Agile implementations often leads to failure.
Don’t let your organization get carried away with the hype around Agile. The quantitative benefits of Agile are not realized by most organizations due to immature implementation and adoption of Agile principles and practices.

Impact and Result

Educate and train your executive, management, and delivery teams to adopt Agile the right way.
Assess your current software development lifecycle (SDLC), culture, and environment to evaluate Agile fit and determine what changes need to be implemented.
Conduct a structured evaluation of Agile to assess and recognize the benefits of Agile in your organization and teams.
Develop an iterative approach to rolling out Agile within your organization to fail fast and recover quickly.

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should implement Agile, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Implement Agile Practices That Work – Executive Brief

Implement Agile Practices That Work – Phases 1-3

1. Facilitate Agile learning

Begin your Agile journey by facilitating learning at every layer of your organization to ensure all stakeholders and team members are aligned.

Implement Agile Practices That Work – Phase 1: Facilitate Agile Learning

Agile Playbook Template

2. Assess current state

Obtaining a holistic view of your development environment allows you to pinpoint the root causes behind the issues that can derail your Agile implementation.

Implement Agile Practices That Work – Phase 2: Assess Current State

3. Execute your structured evaluation

Begin with by-the-book scrum to gain a grounded understanding of Agile behaviors and mindsets and then customize it to fit your context.

Implement Agile Practices That Work – Phase 3: Execute Your Structured Evaluation

Scrum Documentation Template

Guided Implementations

This guided implementation is a nine call advisory process.

Guided Implementation #1 - Facilitate Agile learning

Call #1 - Discuss how to facilitate learning about Agile across your organization’s executive and management teams.

Call #2 - Discuss how to facilitate learning about Agile with your application delivery teams.

Guided Implementation #2 - Assess current state

Call #1 - Discuss your team and organization’s readiness for Agile.

Call #2 - Discuss your team culture and the different components that can be drivers or roadblocks to adopting Agile.

Call #3 - Review your SDLC process to identify any changes impacted by adopting Agile.

Guided Implementation #3 - Execute your structured evaluation

Call #1 - Discuss and understand what the scrum methodology is.

Call #2 - Discuss how to identify, assess, engage, and communicate with different stakeholder groups.

Call #3 - Discuss the criteria used to evaluate and determine the right pilot project.

Call #4 - Understand the different practices and ceremonies involved with adopting scrum.

Book Your Workshop

Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Lead and Manage Agile

The Purpose

Build knowledge and support for Agile practices across different layers of your organization.
Build knowledge of Agile practices and concepts across the executive and management teams to drive the change.

Key Benefits Achieved

Facilitate learning for your organization’s executives and management.
Agile practices and principles.
Baseline Agile practices.
Key tools that support Agile practices that work.

Activities

Outputs

1.1

Compare Agile and Waterfall delivery.

1.2

Decode Agile: Principles, terminology, and roles.

1.3

Product owners and product agility.

Agile personal story card.

1.4

Enterprise agility and the value of change.

Identified business value sources.

1.5

Lead, manage, and govern Agile teams.

Organization culture assessment.

1.6

Define your Agile principles.

1.7

Commit to Agile.

Module 2: Introduction to Agile and Agile Culture

The Purpose

Determine the gaps in your organization’s current environment and culture before implementing Agile to ensure success.

Key Benefits Achieved

Understanding of your team and organization’s culture and how this impacts adopting Agile practices.
SWOT analysis.

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Assess Agile culture.

Evaluation of team and organization’s culture and fit for Agile.

2.2

SWOT analysis.

Completed SWOT analysis.

Module 3: Assess Current State and Understand the Scrum Process

The Purpose

Evaluate your team and organization’s current environment as it relates to your SDLC process to determine how Agile can best be implemented.
Understand the baseline scrum process as a starting point to adopting good Agile practices.

Key Benefits Achieved

Completed SDLC stage-gates.
SDLC process flow.
Pain points in SDLC as they relate to Agile.
Identify and evaluate business value definitions.
Identify "ready" and "done" definitions.
Understand the baseline scrum methodology and practices.

Activities

Outputs

3.1

Identify and describe SDLC stage-gates.

Completed SDLC stage-gates.

3.2

Draw current SDLC.

SDLC process flow.

3.3

Determine pain points in SDLC.

Pain points in SDLC as they relate to Agile.

3.4

Identify and evaluate business value definitions.

Completed business value definitions.

3.5

Identify “ready” and “done” definitions.

Completed “ready” and “done” definitions.

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this Blueprint, and what our clients have to say.

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

Testimonial

AARP Inc

Workshop

10/10

$1.32M

120

Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada

Guided Implementation

8/10

N/A

Saskatchewan Blue Cross

Workshop

10/10

$50,000

Best: We now have a foundation on which to start our Agile journey and it is significant to me that this foundation is built on agile/scrum best practices and sized to fit our organization. Worst: Even though some ceremonies like scrum of scrums and other topics like backlog tiers definition and criteria for the tiers seemed to be out of scope for the workshop, I wished that they were included as part of our Playbook because they are necessary to the agile framework given our context here at SBC.

The Suddath Companies

Guided Implementation

10/10

$2,647

Lend Lease ICT Services, Inc.

Guided Implementation

8/10

N/A

Libro Credit Union

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

I cannot provide an estimate of time and money savings at this. The information provided and discussion was extremely helpful in understanding Agile practices and focus areas

NTI Limited

Guided Implementation

8/10

N/A

Great conversation which created a lot of challenging thought.

BlueScope Buildings

Guided Implementation

7/10

$13,236

Elavon, Inc.

Guided Implementation

10/10

$926K

knowledge was the best, practical implementable advice BEST Worst - I didn't meet Cole sooner ;-)

North Carolina Department of Information Technology

Guided Implementation

4/10

N/A

Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat

Workshop

9/10

N/A

It's difficult to measure the time and cost savings, as we are still early in our Agile Adoption. That being said, the feedback from the workshop attendees have been very positive with respect to the delivery of the content by Cole and how Agile framework maps to the TBS.

Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat

Workshop

9/10

N/A

Cihr

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

Saskatchewan Blue Cross

Guided Implementation

8/10

N/A

CaroMont Health

Guided Implementation

9/10

$6,618

Meridian Health Plan

Workshop

9/10

$66,183

Gerry and Max were very knowledgeable and also a solid culture fit for our organization. They were able to lead a heavily customized workshop that emphasized a consultation approach to understanding our level of Agile maturity and designing a roadmap for future maturity.

Bellevue University

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

Andritz Inc

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

Pacific Blue Cross

Workshop

7/10

N/A

It is difficult to complete the survey because the final outputs have not been delivered.

Office of Information Services for Oregon Health Authority (OHA) & Department of Human Services (DHS)

Guided Implementation

8/10

$13,236

International Development Research Centre

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

SMART Payment Plan

Guided Implementation

8/10

$33,091

Good details and commitment and a straightforward, repeatable process. Hardest part was just getting consistent commitment from the business.

Cascades, Centre des Technologies

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

The Suddath Companies

Guided Implementation

8/10

N/A

It was a good session. We were hopeful for easy, simple answers for our current pain points, but as we suspected, there are no easy answers and we heard a lot of "it depends". Which wasn't surprising. We did hear a few immediate resources and recommendations which we'll look to implement which should help. We are eager to get the follow-up materials.

Jamaica Public Service

Guided Implementation

4/10

N/A

Cobb County

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

120

Nothing that I know of.

Alabama Department of Corrections

Guided Implementation

7/10

N/A

The analyst was given the wrong subject matter, but was able to provide some limited feedback and requested a meeting with another analyst.

City of Toronto

Guided Implementation

10/10

$3,000

The customer service is the best! Andrew is extremely helpful, nothing to report on the worst.

First National Bank - Card IT

Guided Implementation

6/10

N/A

Great expierence with insight into what we require to know.

Choctaw Nation Of Oklahoma

Workshop

3/10

N/A

This was a good educational experience for the team and a good start to the process. It helped us roadmap for our POC but that won't start until the new fiscal budget cycle starts so results will come later.