The Road to Agile Growth (again)
Posted on June 28, 2009
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My lack of blog posts has not been for lack of agile interest, rather, it’s been because of the “tornado” we’re in at my company. We experienced high waves of growth in mid 08, followed by the horrible economic and market downturn in late 08, and, then, almost immediately followed by unbelievable growth and funding conditions in early 09. (Thanks President Obama!) The turmoil is exciting, yet stressful in itself (as the canker sore above my left upper canine is currently exhibiting).
The good news is that we’re on the upslope again. In his visit to our headquarters last week, Colorado’s Governor Bill Ritter recently put us in the “sweet spot” of the state’s new energy economy.
So, how does this relate to the Agile Product Owner’s blog? Well, because we’re in growth mode again, we’re once again thinking about how to best scale the organization for optimal software and embedded firmware efficiency, and always be one step ahead of the market. This creates opportunities for current and future employees, while it can also fashions discomfort of the unknown in the transition.
I’m a huge fan of Dean Leffingwell’s Scaling Software Agility blog. He clearly has his finger on Scaling the Agile Enterprise. However, as self-admitted in his Product Managers AND Product Owners post, most of the methods discussed are cultured from enterprise organizations. We’re still a baby-enterprise learning to walk/run. The challenge is, aside from just hiring the crap out of the huge unemployment pool and filling the holes (highly unmanageable and not recommended), how do you strategically grow the organization, and what are the most efficient transition/knowledge transfer/migration/ steps along the way?
Let’s start with the Scrum Team. I like this ideal scrum team architecture from Dean’s blog:
Optimal Scrum Team
While we have the characteristics (collocated, dedicated, focused, cross-functional, self-organizing), the teams are physically not organized as such… yet. It’s highly likely we’ll get there soon, as we are seeing the benefits to this team architecture.
So, my intention here is to document how we get there from here. Here are some of the challenges:
- 1 Scrum master serving 5 functional teams (ouch!)
- 0 Product Owners (or whatever the argued title is) as defined in this blog and many others. The role is there, however shared between product management and engineering management, and it’s stressing the process. (‘ak!’, you say, ‘how can you even be the Agile Product Owner without currently being one?’…’sigh, I know‘…I reply…)
- 1 UI designer software, 0 UI designers embedded
- 1 Sr. Architect
- 1.5 Technical writers and they don’t live in engineering
- 4-5 QA professionals, not paired directly with the scrum team
- Dozens of developers, organized in various teams
Aside from the obvious answer: ‘just reorganize and staff it’, what are the strategic and tactical steps we can do along the way to get there? Don’t know exactly, but I’ll share when I do. Let the journey begin…
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[...] my last blog, I communicated some of our challenges on scaling, and The Road to Agile Growth. Building the Optimal Scrum Team is definitely top of mind, and how we get there is secondary. But [...]