As we look to 2017, we would like to share InRhythm’s most memorable, interesting and fun facts from 2016. Wishing you success in the new year!
Your partners in accelerated digital transformation
This year, have had the privilege of working with truly amazing clients, serving as their trusted partner in implementing modern digital transformations. We have made inroads into new markets, expanded our geographic influence, and were fortunate enough to collaborate on many incredibly exciting projects. Our continued growth and success have laid the foundation to make this new year even better.
As we look to 2017, we would like to share InRhythm’s most memorable, interesting and fun facts from 2016. Wishing you success in the new year!
Any transformation is hard, especially in a corporate environment with well established processes and predefined expectations. Agile implementation in an enterprise is a complex endeavor that changes the way people think and operate. Leaders of this transformation face challenges that are unique to them but may have been faced by others in similar roles in other large companies. The goal of InRhythm’s Enterprise Agile Breakfast series is to bring these leaders together in order to share advice and support each other on resolving obstacles and bringing success to the transformations including cultural, process, financial, and other aspects of a large enterprise-level change.
When we started hosting monthly Enterprise Agile Breakfasts, for leaders of Agile transformations in large companies in October 2015, our goal was to create a safe container for this group of change agents to be able to share their opinions, form partnerships, and support each other. During the first session, the participants used a Scrum retrospective format and came with a set of topics including:
– Adapting Agile to enterprise – Bending not Breaking
– Taking people to church vs. making them believe in God
– Agile enterprise with offshore teams
– Measuring business value and costs in Agile at enterprise level
– Showing the financial benefits of Agility
– Agile metrics (what really makes sense?)
– Portfolio management at scale 200+ projects
For the December session, we prioritized two topics: cultural aspect of Agile and Agile enterprise with highly distributed teams. Chris Deptula from Shutterstock volunteered to lead the offshore Agile enterprise topic and Olga Lech, who has extensive Agile transformation experience with multiple enterprise-level companies, volunteered to facilitate the Agile culture-related set of topics. The conversations all centered around our role as change agents in building the Agile ecosystem that empowers teams to be successful in a highly scaled environment. In this blog post, I will mention some of the discussion topics the group came up with in relation to the topic of changing Agile culture at enterprise level: “how do we avoid taking people to church vs. making them believe in God”, i.e. how do we change Agile culture at scale rather than establish the processes for everyone to follow without changing their values and help everyone involved in transition – managers, stakeholders, and organizational-level leaders to develop Agile and lean thinking.
The topic started with a dichotomy and continued with a discussion of a number of culture-related Agile dichotomies:
Participants shared their advice in identifying and supporting change agents who make Agile transformation a success.
The second topic was related to Agile in a distributed enterprise. Cultural change is not easy at scale when everyone is co-located. Having highly distributed teams across time zones when direct communication is challenging, if not impossible, imposes additional challenges on Agile transformation leaders. Participants discussed hub-and-spoke operating model and how to bring Agile teams together despite time zone and cultural differences. We felt this topic was so important that we decided to continue this discussion at the next session in January 2016. Chris Deptula who led the conversation summarized topics in the following way:
Written by Mariya Breyter
This week, along with CEO Gunjan Doshi, we’ve deployed a 4-person team to Florida on a mission of guiding a client on their journey of digital transformation in accordance with industry standards. In addition to thought leadership and enterprise Agile coaching, our team will be leading the front-end architecture, UX design, and more! They are having a blast and we’re excited to see the transformation unfold!
Here’s a taste of what went on this week:
Monday
Project kick-off, Gunjan Doshi, Phil Mondestin, and Davis Koh did an amazing job of introducing everyone to our frameworks and methodology.
Tuesday
The InRhythm team worked with the client’s team to start understanding the application, identify user roles, and identify pain points. We introduced story mapping, collaborative story sharing and using a physical whiteboard to facilitate planning. At the same time, the engineering team worked on core architecture and infrastructure plans.
Wednesday
The engineering team worked together on getting back-end, front-end, Docker containers, Circle CI, and automated deployment working on their local and staging environments. The front-end “Hello World” app is talking to the back-end. The back-end is hitting some of the legacy web services to ensure end to end communication is working. Each check-in to source control, kick off a build, run tests, and package to a Docker container which is then shipped to the server and made available.
We continued to coach the client’s product managers, project managers, leadership team, and engineering team on lean & agile techniques.
Thursday
We reviewed the user stories from the Product Management. The Engineering Team continued working towards Friday’s Tracer Bullet deliverable as well as some spike work surrounding data migration of legacy data.
Friday
Feedback Friday. We shared our progress with the influencers, observers, and stakeholders on our progress from the week.