Agile portfolio management
When the right people on the right teams have the right context, they naturally do the right thing.
By Dan Radigan
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Summary: Agile portfolio management is an agile approach to managing a portfolio of projects. This is done in a way that includes continuous experimentation, decentralized control, and transparency.
Can agile practices work across a large portfolio of many teams and lots of developers? Absolutely with agile portfolio management. Netflix coined the phrase «highly aligned, loosely coupled» to describe well-tuned agile portfolio management across a large organization. Let’s look at the role of context and autonomy, as well as some common characteristics found among high-functioning agile portfolios.
Set the right context
With so much focus on the team, senior management in a large-scale agile organization are often left wondering what their role is. As drivers of strategy and direction, senior leadership can be key champions of agile culture for the whole organization. For agile development across a portfolio of products, strategy and direction manifest as «themes»: large areas of focused work, defined over a period of time. Themes help multiple teams working on one business initiative to collaborate effectively and deliver on the organization’s goals.
A transparent culture surfaces issues without fear of retaliation, and it minimizes the negative aspects of company politics. As a result, it’s easier to find the right solution and keep teams moving forward.
Expand agile practices across the organization
The most successful companies running agile at scale share three common traits. First, the entire program is iterative. Traditional portfolio management is focused on top-down planning with work laid out over long time periods, but agile portfolio management takes the concept of build-measure-learn cycles used by individual agile teams and applies it on a larger scale. Long-term agile planning is carried out by teams working together, using modular design, and sharing findings on a regular cadence. And they’re empowered to make trade-offs in the scope of work, the timing of its execution, and the resources allocated to get the job done – key elements of the iron triangle of planning. This results in tremendous flexibility, which shifts the focus from continuing to execute on an inflexible plan to delivering value and making tangible progress according to business strategy and goals.
Second, successful organizations communicate across the portfolio. They share knowledge and break barriers between organizational silos. Similar to agile ceremonies on the team level, context needs to be shared constantly throughout the organization so that goals, progress, and stumbling blocks are transparent for everyone. This fosters respect between teammates and coworkers alike, regardless of role within the organization, and encourages interactions that are rooted in empathy and understanding.
Third, the most agile organizations make frequent releases across the portfolio, even if a release involves the work of multiple programs. Aligned sprint cycles, work invested in strong APIs and technical decoupling, and an efficient automated testing and deployment pipeline all guarantee constant visibility into who is shipping what and when.
Share one vision, but embrace diversity
As in traditional agile development, work in portfolio agile development is delegated to teams rather than individuals. Each team understands the organization’s larger goals, and each team also develops a vibrant culture that optimizes its own processes and delivery.
For example, story points are a common way teams estimate work, and use a set of values based on the Fibonacci sequence (0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100). Team A’s idea of what an 8 means will probably differ from team B’s. For this reason, senior management shouldn’t measure teams by numeric velocity alone. (Numeric velocity is the amount of story points a team can complete within a sprint.) They must understand that each team’s velocity will be unique because each team calibrates story point values differently.
Likewise, agile teams have different release cultures. Scrum teams usually release software at the end of each sprint, while kanban teams release continually or when the product owner requests a build be pushed to production. One of the big challenges in agile portfolios is releasing large quantities of code at once–or rather, avoiding that. No one wants releases that requires the entire engineering staff on deck, after all. Separating code into independent release streams by using modular, rather than monolithic, design, goes a long way in terms of flexibility and autonomy among business units. Modular design also reduces risk in each release because less code is changing with each release. That makes it easier to diagnose and fix problems afterwards.
Autonomy also extends into workflows for portfolio organizations. Teams that work in different parts of the business may have unique workflows. It’s a good bet that a software engineering team will have a different workflow and process than a marketing team, even when both departments follow agile principles like iterative development and regular retrospection. Or two development teams may choose to divide their workflow into different states. And that’s ok! This diversity gives large agile portfolios the benefit of shared knowledge. Trying more things means you’re learning more things that can shared across the organization.
Expand agility as you grow
Agile portfolio management for a large portfolio means scaling agile principles used at the team level across a whole organization. Agile culture is a force multiplier: it naturally scales upward and outward when its core principles are followed and shared. But the portfolio will only be as successful as its weakest team. To ensure success, senior leadership must work in partnership with all teams to build a healthy agile culture.
Ready to take agile adoption to the Portfolio level? Learn how the enterprise agile planning platform, Jira Align, helps improve visibility, strategic alignment, and enterprise adaptability in order to accelerate your digital transformation.
Agile Portfolio Management
How to bring agility at a global level with the help of Agile portfolio management.
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There are so many posts and scientific materials about Agile portfolio management; however, the fundamental problems have yet to be resolved.
With the majority adopting Agile and an increasing desire to get Agile at scale , current project portfolio management (PPM) practices are becoming more challenging than ever.
In this article, we define what Agile portfolio management is, share its common rules and practices, and offer reliable Agile portfolio management tools that will help you to succeed.
What Is Agile Portfolio Management?
If you try to find an Agile portfolio management definition, you will probably find numerous results and variations. Google it and you’ll see.
Let’s say, Agile portfolio management is about how a particular company identifies, organizes, manages, and prioritizes different products. it helps you to optimize the value development in a manner that’s sustainable in the long run.
Agile portfolio management guarantees that the organization provides its customers with the best value for their investment. An effective portfolio manager understands and follows all Agile principles. He/she considers different factors needed to efficiently manage various projects and teams. In fact, Agile portfolio management helps businesses to respond more quickly to rapidly changing market conditions.
Agile means that you are continuously delivering value. On an enterprise-wide scale, working in accordance with the Agile methodology allows companies to anticipate and adapt to changes in real-time.
Can any company go full Agile all at once? Not really. However, agility can be introduced as part of the organizational journey. This transformative process allows businesses to adapt at their own pace. For example, it can start with static annual planning exercises and end up with a dynamic continuous planning process.
What Are the Goals of Agile Portfolio Management?
According to PMI (the Project Management Institute), there are some essential goals that project, program, and portfolio management should achieve:
- predictable delivery capacity
- the reduction of possible risks
- the ease to change direction
- fast feedback
However, team-level agility cannot be enough to reach end-to-end business agility.
The path to Agile working can be risky, as changing ways of working can affect the whole organization. It may confuse the PMO when too many approaches are applied, from the traditional approach to Kanban or Scrum. The role of a portfolio manager is to adapt to the changing business needs and support new ways of working.
Thanks to Agile teams working on more targeted and small releases, the risk associated with product delivery diminishes. And iterative feedback loops guarantee that the product is what clients really want.
With Agile portfolio management, you can introduce new ideas and changes and create customer-centric products.
PPM and Agile PPM
Some managers think being Agile means giving up control of project portfolio management (PPM). This is a misperception that is typically based on experience.
To analyze potential ROI in a project, the PMO has a highly structured process for consolidating and centralizing relevant data. You deal with allocated resources and assigned teams.
PPM demands rigor and many consider it as the opposite of Agile. Agile project portfolio management uses the same real-time data to prioritize work according to the business value.
Agile teams form around high-value products. They deliver in increments. Agile PPM arrives at similar goals as traditional project portfolio management but in an iterative way.
The List of Activities Associated with Disciplined Agile Portfolio Management
Here are the critical process factors to consider:
1. Defining potential value
A portfolio management team works in cooperation with a product management team to identify new ideas and products to develop. It is achieved through monitoring the business environment and competitors, obtaining feedback from the existing clients, and envisioning the future needs of your audience through brainstorming sessions and Agile modeling.
2. Considering potential endeavors
Your portfolio management team will need to invest time in understanding a potential endeavor. The business case can be considered as an endeavor when you make high-level guesses at the market potential or ROI. Additionally, the team can run a focus group or small experiment to better understand this.
3. Prioritizing the endeavors
Not many companies have enough budget to work. Therefore, you will need to prioritize potential endeavors and invest in those that look most important. While prioritizing, pay attention to business value, possible risks, due dates, and dependencies.
4. Managing portfolio budget
Agile portfolio managers need to work with finance to manage portfolio budgets.
Many companies often follow an annual budgeting process that leads to significant overhead and risk in their efforts. It is better to move away from project-based financing to funding stable teams.
5. Initiating endeavors
New product development may require the participation of a product team or a project team. If a product is radically new to your business, you may choose an exploratory approach where you first validate the market potential of the product via a range of learning experiments.
6. Financing endeavors
Financing endeavors include the initial funding for the new project and product teams and ongoing funding for construction, transition, and operation of solutions once they’ve been deployed. The funding process should be monitored regularly to be sure the money is spent wisely.
7. Planning capability
The team must have enough resources (people and finance) to fulfill its responsibilities. The right people with the right skills should be capable of doing the work and this will require coordination with your people management team.
8. Managing vendors
Another essential aspect of portfolio management is coordination with vendor management, especially when it comes to service vendors providing contractors, consultants, or outsourced development services.
Vendor management contains the awarding of contracts, monitoring in-progress contracts, identifying potential vendors, as well as ending contracts.
9. Managing portfolio
Portfolio governance is a path of the overall strategy, so someone should govern it, including in-progress development endeavors and all operational solutions.
What Are the Key Pillars of Agile Portfolio Management?
Agile companies should maintain transparency, continuously experiment to define whether a project is valuable, and align strategy with execution. These are the core pillars of Agile portfolio management.
1. Scaled transparency
The rapidly changing business environment today requires creating transparency in the portfolio and overall project management processes.
Detailed status reports provided by portfolio managers or project managers are traditionally important. However, this requires valuable time, and often the reports are reliant on flawed estimations.
Agile is focused on reaching a shared purpose for everyone to follow. Handy visual boards help portfolio managers easily capture ideas for many projects and create a shared understanding of what’s happening inside the portfolio. Agile also emphasizes high-level forecasting of project plans. It is about taking actual data into account and retaining the flexibility to update the plans based on new info.
2. Portfolio prioritization
Sometimes teams have numerous brilliant ideas but starting work on all of them can overload people and result in high inefficiencies. That’s why it is very important to learn how to prioritize accordingly and choose only the most valuable ones.
The concept of rapid experimentation is what helps in Agile. You can run small experiments to define whether a given project is worth pursuing. You will quickly gather data before rushing to make any big commitments.
3. Aligning strategy and execution
Achieving alignment between strategy and execution is another crucial pillar of Agile portfolio management. As you already know, the portfolio is the connecting part between those two. So, successful portfolio management requires that you have a way to align the highest business objectives with the project execution.
To do this, Agile preaches frequent feedback loops that can be applied globally and locally. It is about creating a network of short planning and learning cycles on various organizational levels so that you can review strategy, risks, and delivery capabilities.
5 Rules of Agile Portfolio Management
A portfolio contains groups of work under consideration that may be related or not and that aligns with investment strategies.
The active part of the portfolio is funded. And the work that is funded may have different names — product release, program, epic, initiative, etc.
There are 5 simple rules that can be used to collectively right-size a portfolio. Here they are:
- All work is strongly ranked. Artificially ranked work tells us about too many dependencies. Companies that give everything the highest priority cannot articulate real priorities.
- Operating on good enough data. At the stage of decision-making, you’ll probably have no detailed data for all portfolio items. Uncoordinated planning will point to external demand for artificial precision. Remember that certain levels of detail in one area do not necessitate expensive-to-obtain detail in other areas.
- Short-term capacity is fixed. It is quite difficult to hire and empower knowledge workers to influence the outcomes of portfolio management in 3-6 months. Of course, there are exclusions but they are far rarer than funding managers want to acknowledge.
- Every value-based delivery capability has a portfolio. An isolated component team can’t deliver realizable value without other contributions. When you subdivide a portfolio, you reduce transparency. This undermines the purpose of connecting work to strategy.
- There is an “intake system” in each portfolio. All strategic decisions in your portfolio should have full visibility into the entire scope of work required to create, release, support, evolve, and end technology. By over-dividing the portfolio, you create a huge churn and long tails where a piece of work is postponed.
What Are the Best Practices of Agile Portfolio Management?
Continuous planning
A roadmap and a strategic plan are living documents in any Agile enterprise, and they must be updated at least monthly or quarterly. Make strategic planning a continuous process. Track whether all things go according to plan and, if not, change what needs to be changed.
Strategic alignment
Agile portfolio management requires aligning products and programs with strategic objectives. Only those projects get funds that are tightly aligned with strategic objectives.
If the project’s course is not adjusted and strategic objectives shift, things can quickly fall out of alignment. So try to constantly revisit what is important and what is no longer that significant.
Program management
Planning related work in a coordinated way provides unique benefits. In the process, you get a chance to translate strategic objectives into business values. The metrics for measuring progress are different. Another distinguishing characteristic is fast feedback. It validates the program direction before too much is invested.
Resource management
When a portfolio of work is under consideration for funding, every single project, initiative, or product release is prioritized in accordance with business strategy and customer value. Optimizing resources and matching capacity to demand become easier when you have clear business drivers.
Enough governance
Agile portfolio management weakens the reigns on project teams (in comparison with the control that may have been exerted in the past). Agile governance is enough to reach value-based delivery while providing the flexibility to learn from successes and failures.
Iterative releases
The power of iterative funding that is tied to iterative releases is used in Agile portfolio management. Therefore, the feedback from clients constantly shapes the work in progress. It maximizes the value delivered with each release.
Agile Portfolio in Practice: How to Manage It
All the moments discussed above give you the direction of creating Agile portfolio management. For practice, you will need a complete management system to visualize, align, and prioritize your projects from the portfolio. This is where Kanban comes to help you bring theory to reality.
The power of Kanban
The main focus of the Kanban methodology is on visualization, managing flow, limiting work in progress, and continuous improvement.
At the Portfolio level, it is achieved through the concept of portfolio Kanban. It allows tracking and optimizing the flow of various business initiatives, projects, or entire products.
Interconnected Kanban boards are used to visualize initiatives, tasks, multiple projects, or project deliverables.
If you need to progress down to lower levels, interconnected Kanban board examples can be applied to visualize different parts of the department or even the whole company.
Conclusion
Everyone who has an Agile mind should be sure that their portfolio management practices do not undermine the value of Agile. The rules and practices described above will help you to make portfolio management more effective in today’s constantly changing environment.
Agile product management and portfolio platforms explained
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When you ask product owners if agile tools work well for them, you’ll get a mixed, sometimes negative response. Agile tools do help agile teams, but they don’t provide all the capabilities that product owners need to do their jobs.
Similarly, agile tools have limited functionality to help program and portfolio managers. Agile tools typically provide reports on teams, releases, and epics that are often insufficient to help program managers reports on top-down strategic initiatives.
So, don’t be surprised if the product owner on your team hates Atlassian’s Jira or if the program manager can’t get the reporting they need from Jira or Microsoft’s Azure DevOps. Those tools only serve part of the team’s job functions.
Backlogs, sprint boards, and scrum reports do not fully address the tools product managers need to conceive great products or help program managers align strategic goals with the work performed by agile teams. If you’re stuck in a lot of meetings with product and program managers reviewing work status or learning business strategies through PowerPoint presentations, your organization may be ready for an agile product management or portfolio management platform.
Agile management platforms such as Jira and Azure DevOps are primarily designed for agile delivery teams that include developers, testers, and devops engineers. They have boards to manage the status of user stories and other types of work committed to the active sprint, and they have other backlog management tools to help review, sequence, and prioritize stories for future sprints. They come with built in burndown reports and other reports to help agile teams track velocity, review blocks, measure cycle times, and manage work in progress. Agile tools also help product owners write stories, document acceptance criteria, and review story point estimates. They use the tools to prioritize work for sprints and track progress.
Product management platforms share vision and capture roadmaps
Product managers and owners start their work by listening to customers and prospects, determining their needs, identifying how to deliver business value to them, adding ideas and strategic requirements from internal stakeholders, and defining product and services that deliver great customer experiences. In the early stages of product development, their work is a mix of researching markets, testing ideas, and communicating a strategy to stakeholders.
Along this journey, they often develop product visions, business models, competitive analysis, user personas, business goals, and other artifacts to help communicate their objectives to leaders and agile teams.
The traditional tools used by product managers to capture and communicate these artifacts are a mix of PowerPoint and Excel. Although these tools can work at the start of product development to get buyin from stakeholders and align teams, they are poor choices for managing stakeholder expectations as products are developed, released, and enhanced. To manage these responsibilities, product managers and owners need to manage higher-level feature backlogs, communicate the status of releases, and share longer-term roadmaps.
And these tools need to align with agile principles that empower teams to commit, adjust priorities, and self-organize around delivering solutions.
Platforms like Jira Align (formally AgileCraft), Aha, and Version One Ultimate Edition provide product managers these tools along with the integrations into the agile backlogs and release plans. They include a centralized platform for product managers to communicate their product strategies, tools to engage stakeholders on their ideas, and reporting mechanisms to share releases statuses and roadmaps.
For example, Aha enables several integrations with agile tools that include Jira, Azure DevOps, Rally, and Trello to roll up information on teams, user stories, features, and releases. This information can then be mapped to several Aha constructs such as feature backlogs, roadmaps, initiatives, and goals. This is the bottom-up view that lets product managers share status information and plans with stakeholders.
Aha also provides product managers the tools to articulate their strategy, capture business models, and communicate user personas. Organizations using these tools have a standard and centralized way for product managers to engage the organization on goals, vision, and priorities.
Portfolio management drive alignment and standards in large organizations
Enterprises developing a mix of customer-facing products, workflow applications, integrations, business intelligence dashboards, and other technology deliverables also require additional tools to ensure that initiatives are delivering against strategic goals. Large enterprises typically have layered organizational hierarchies and require top-down communications on priorities and bottom-up metrics that can be aggregated into status reports.
Project portfolio management (PPM) tools have been around for some time and can help organizations manage and track strategic initiatives. But many early generations of these tools were designed to aggregate traditional well-structured waterfall project schedules, including milestones and tasks with defined start and end dates. These tools can’t easily aggregate agile projects oriented around sprints and user stories that have changing schedules and priorities managed by self-organizing teams. Some PPM tools that don’t support agile frameworks have data integration complexities rolling up agile data on releases and epics. Worse, PPM workflows driven by top-done scheduling and priorities often create culture clashes between portfolio managers and agile teams.
Portfolio managers tasked with with frameworks like SAFe, DAD, LeSS, and my own Driving Digital also need portfolio tools to provide oversight on multiple agile teams and establish process standards.
Agile portfolio tools such as Jira Align and VersionOne Ultimate Edition let you manage initiatives at a layer above the work being done by agile teams. They provide visibility on teams’ velocity and capacity so you can assign initiatives to teams and forecast timelines. They also provide tools to assign business value to initiatives and align teams, priorities, and level of investment appropriately.
Jira Align goes beyond managing a portfolio of initiatives, tracking epics, and aggregating agile project metrics. It has tools to visualize and manage dependencies between teams, track risks, and share strategic information with agile teams.
How these tools benefit agile teams
Agile tools have traditionally been used to help teams manage backlogs, align on requirements, commit to sprints, and target reliable releases.
In larger organizations, the underlying data from agile tools becomes critically important to help management understand status and align teams to initiatives that drive the greatest business value. To do this effectively, agile teams have to adopt standards in how they are using the tools, workflows, and data fields especially around work items, sprints, and releases. If teams use the tools without standards, it creates data quality issues and makes it far more difficult for product management and portfolio tools to aggregate up metrics and status.
And without good data, you can expect many meetings with product and program to discuss and capture team status. That can be frustrating to developers that are often overtaxed with developing features and addressing technical debt. By selecting and instrumenting the right process and tools, management get the top-down workflows and reports required to drive strategic priorities without overly burdening agile development teams.
Agile на 11 000 сотрудников
Рассказ о том, как устроена разработка в Сбербанке, и первый фоторепортаж из нового офиса.
Сбербанк существует на рынке уже 176 лет. В нём обслуживаются 140 млн физических лиц и 2 млн корпоративных клиентов. Компания представлена в 22 странах, в ней трудятся более 300 000 специалистов.
В банке продолжается масштабная реформа, одной из ключевых частей которой было переосмысление и изменение подхода к развитию продуктов. Изучив опыт иностранных финансовых институтов и успешных компаний Кремниевой долины, банк построил собственную модель работы, учитывающую основные принципы гибкой разработки Agile — в банке её называют Sbergile.
В отличие от технологических гигантов и финтех-компаний, Сбербанк не был компанией, функционирующей по принципам Agile, с самого начала. Однако мы продемонстрировали, что эту философию управления 21 века можно успешно внедрить. И пользоваться её преимуществами для компании и клиентов — независимо от количества работающих сотрудников.
Благодаря этому подходу мы значительно повысили скорость работы: например, путем сокращения времени вывода продукта на рынок до нескольких недель по сравнению с несколькими месяцами ранее. И смогли помочь нашим клиентам сохранить самый драгоценный ресурс — время.
С тех пор топ-менеджмент лидирует Agile-трансформацию, а Сбербанк стремится стать ИТ-компанией с банковской лицензией. Продуктовая линейка должна быстро адаптироваться под запросы рынка.
Важно понимать, что Agile — не самоцель для банка, а всего лишь актуальный для сегодняшнего времени способ достижения целей и сохранения конкурентоспособности перед резко растущим числом финтех-стартапов.
Наблюдательный совет Сбербанка утвердил стратегию до 2020 года, в которой указаны ключевые приоритеты развития. Среди них — лучший клиентский опыт и экосистема, технологическое лидерство и люди нового качества в эффективных командах.
Agile-трансформация в Сбербанке сконцентрирована в трех основных областях: удовлетворенность клиентов, продуктивность сотрудников и улучшение ключевых показателей: таких как время, необходимое для принятия решений, вывода продукта на рынок и поставки продукта клиентам.
Более 11 000 сотрудников, работающих в Sbergile, поделены на трайбы (от английского tribe — племя). Каждый трайб — это агломерация команд, объединенных вокруг какой-то общей бизнес-цели, например, развития карточных продуктов. И «карточные» в данном случае — условное обозначение, потому что в зону ответственности этого направления входят любые способы оплаты, включая эквайринг, смартфоны, NFC-кольца и другие. Цели каждого трайба вытекают из стратегии развития банка и формируются лидерами трайбов при участии топ-менеджмента банка.
Каждый квартал кураторы трайбов вместе с лидерами трайбов обсуждают цели на ближайшие три месяца. На этой же встрече лидеры трайбов синхронизируются между собой, обсуждают результаты предыдущего квартала и планы на следующий. После этого команды декомпозируют эти цели на конкретные задачи в бэклоге и делят на спринты (такт работы команды, в ходе которого создаётся новая версия продукта).
Примеры трайбов, в каждом из которых работает от сотни до нескольких сотен человек (сейчас более 20 трайбов): «Эквайринг и банковские карты», «Платежи и переводы», «Занять и сберегать» — названия говорят сами за себя, Digital business Platform — «Сбербанк Онлайн», веб- и мобильное приложение для различных устройств. Это одновременно и самостоятельные продукты, и канал для других продуктов.
Внедрение гибкой разработки — это непрекращающийся эксперимент. Разные трайбы находятся в разной стадии зрелости с точки зрения использования Agile-практик. Кто-то в стадии формирования и перехода, а кто-то уже полностью работает в логике Agile.
А команды, в свою очередь, из специалистов. В каждой команде работает от 9 до 12 человек, которые в разных пропорциях делятся на категории — бизнес и ИТ. Прямая коммуникация между ними сама по себе ускоряет работу.
Но объединение разработчиков и бизнеса — недостаточное условие для повышения скорости и качества разработки. Все сотрудники, переходящие на систему гибкой разработки, проходят обязательное обучение по специальной программе «Основы Sbergile», которую проводят Agile-коучи. После этого коучи запускают команды и сопровождают их в дальнейшем. На данный момент в Сбербанке на постоянной основе работают более 60 коучей.
Agile-коуч относительно новая профессия на рынке. В России не так много людей, которые имеют опыт работы в этой роли. Поэтому в банке работают коучи с разным бэкграундом. Кто-то в прошлом скрам-мастер, кто-то имеет большой опыт фасилитации и разработки. Есть специалисты, которые работали тренерами в Кремниевой долине, спецы с продуктовой экспертизой. Часть коучей — это сотрудники банка, которые прошли специальный отбор и переквалифицировались на этапе перехода в Agile.
Коучи помогают командам настраивать церемонии, поддерживать эффективность, двигаясь к своей цели, решать конфликты, обращать внимание на сильные и слабые стороны, замедляющие обстоятельства, определять, где болит и как это вылечить и так далее.
Команды могут отличаться друг от друга в зависимости от целей и продукта, но в целом все играют по одинаковым правилам. Эти правила — в том числе обязательные для всех команд церемонии — дисциплинируют и помогают командам двигаться быстрее:
Планирование спринта. Команда вместе с владельцем продукта расставляет приоритеты, формирует бэклог, чтобы через две недели показать результат.
Ежедневный стендап. Команда обсуждает планы на день. Каждый участник отвечает на три вопроса:
1. Что я делал вчера для достижения цели спринта?
2. Что я буду делать сегодня?
3. С какими проблемами и препятствиями я столкнулся?
Демонстрация. Презентация результатов двухнедельного спринта, на которой команда собирает независимую обратную связь по своему MVP (Minimum Viable Product — минимальный жизнеспособный продукт). На встрече присутствует лидер чаптера — человек, который контролирует работу специалистов одной области знаний в разных командах.
Продуктовая синхронизация. Синхронизация бэклогов команд (в том числе из разных трайбов), работающих над одним продуктом. Проходит не реже, чем один раз в спринт. Помогает обеспечить целостность продуктов и сроков.
Ретроспектива. Команда с помощью коуча анализирует действия и решает, что нужно поменять в работе, чтобы быть эффективнее и двигаться быстрее.
Portfolio marketplace. Синхронизация команд и выявление взаимозависимостей на уровне трайба. Присутствуют владельцы продуктов, лидер трайба, лидеры чаптеров, коучи.
Квартальный обзор результатов трайбов. Синхронизация между трайбами, расставление приоритетов. Встречаются лидеры трайбов, руководители ИТ- и бизнес-подразделений.
Поделить людей на трайбы, поставить цели и организовать встречи для проверки результата — это только первая часть работы. Сложнее и важнее — создать среду, в которой все участники процесса обогащают друг друга знаниями и проявляют инициативу.
Общая коммуникация строится через привычные каналы — новости, мероприятия, рассылки, видеоблог. Внутри каждого трайба для общения выбирается та среда, которую выбирает коллектив.
У каждого трайба свои особенности — они как отдельные субкультуры. Организовывают свои мероприятия, ездят вместе в горы, путешествуют. Некоторые трайбы ежемесячно проводят тематические завтраки, например, «Кем я хотел быть в детстве». Это лишний повод пообщаться друг с другом и сблизиться.
Коммуникация строится не только линейно, то есть на уровне трайбов, но и между ними — люди объединяются в сообщества на почве личных и профессиональных интересов. Такие сообщества называются «гильдиями», где люди, помимо общего досуга, делятся знаниями и обсуждают общие задачи.
Ежедневно в офисе проходят митапы на разные темы: от дизайна до блокчейна. Их инициируют и проводят сами сотрудники.
Всё устроено так, чтобы люди как можно больше общались лично, обменивались знаниями, договаривались и быстрее принимали решения, а не тратили время на длинные совещания.
В офисе организовано множество мест под разные задачи: переговорки для быстрых разговоров стоя, места для концентрированной работы, коворкинги, многофункциональные зоны для церемоний. У лидеров трайба нет собственных кабинетов — все они сидят вместе с командами.
Sbergile — это фреймворк для разработки и поддержки продуктов в Сбербанке, основанный на ценностях гибких подходов к разработке продукта.
Трайб — группа взаимосвязанных команд, сформированная вокруг определенного продукта или бизнес-цели, и отвечающая за бизнес-результат.
Команда — кроссфункциональная, совместно работающая группа специалистов, обладающая всеми навыками, инструментами и полномочиями для самостоятельной разработки продукта.
Чаптер — группа специалистов одной области компетенций.
Владелец продукта — участник команды, отвечающий за выпуск продукта, соответствующего потребностям клиента, для достижения целей банка, возложенных на трайб. Определяет и приоритизирует требования в бэклоге команды, а также принимает требования (истории) как выполненные.
Участник команды — специалист, непосредственно участвующий в создании продукта команды в пределах своих компетенций.
Лидер трайба — сотрудник, отвечающий за управление продуктом или группой продуктов и достижение бизнес-целей этого трайба. Отвечает за ключевые показатели эффективности трайба в зависимости от его задач (например, P&L, NPS, доля рынка, надежность систем (uptime, количество инцидентов) и так далее).
Agile-коуч — сотрудник, отвечающий за развитие Agile-подхода в организации. Помогает командам проводить церемонии, устранять возникающие препятствия и решать межличностные и методологические конфликты.
Бэклог команды — приоритизированный владельцем продукта перечень всех требований к стриму трайба или программы, переданных в команду либо созданных внутри нее.
Спринт — такт работы команды, в ходе которого создаётся новая версия продукта. Жёстко фиксирован по времени в одну либо в две недели.
Релиз — выпуск готовой версии продуктов трайба.
Minimum Viable Product — минимальная первая версия продукта либо новой крупной функциональности в нём, внедряемая для ранней обратной связи от клиентов.