Program

Enterprise Agile Stage

The Enterprise Agile stage is dedicated to sharing insights from large-scale complex projects operating in organizationally complex eco-systems. Most of these organizations exist in the commercial world, but some exist in the governmental and military space as well. We invite practitioners from all areas to shed light on real-world challenges and share their success, horror stories, and practices for applying agile principles and evolving agile practices.

This stage will stress the practical applications and implications of evolving Agile values and practices to enterprise-scale projects.

Enterprise software development often operates in a context different from that of smaller companies. It is often large in scale and widely distributed. Enterprise software development takes place in a confusing and chaotic mix of software methods, enterprise policies, multiple-organizational entities, competing interests, formal and informal relationships, and personal or political agendas. In ecological terms, there is a great deal of bio-diversity and enterprises are anything but mono-cultures.

Questions this stage will attempt to answer:

How have you applied agile principles and evolved agile practices to cope with the enterprise?
Have you stayed true to the Agile values and principles? How have you had to modify them to survive in the larger context?
What team structures work best at scale? Is it still the Scrum model of Product Owner, Scrum Master, and seven plus or minus two, or are there other models that have worked better?
How are features and stories managed across teams, especially when their implementation spans groups or business units?
What metrics and data are useful to managing an effort at scale? What tools have been used to gather and distribute this information?
What roles and responsibilities differ when scaling agility?
How do teams coordinate, communicate and collaborate in an enterprise environment?
How have you dealt with enterprise-level agile impediments: project stage gate funding, regulatory or governance practices, software capitalization, HR staffing, etc.?
How have you worked with, or worked along-side, process improvement efforts, such as CMMi and Lean Six Sigma?
How do you work with non-agile teams internal and external to the enterprise?
How do you balance self-organization and team ownership with corporate policies?
How do you report, measure and lead agility across such a diverse team/project base?