How we’ve applied agile organizationally at scale and the challenges of scale

1. A holistic approach to
scaling Agile at CSC
Ali Akbar
Technical Director

2. Who are we?

3. Founded 1959
IT Services & Professional Services
Stock Symbol: CSC
FY 14 Revenue: 13 B

4. Problems?

5. Unpredictable completion of anything

6. Lack of
Visibility

8. Resource Bottlenecks

9. Infrequent Customer Feedback

10. 2009 2010 2011 2012 Apr 2013 Jul 2013 2014
Features Delivered per Team
Days between Releases

11. What did we do
about it?

12. Agile Delivery
Methodology (AgDM)
Adaptive Delivery
Methodology (AdDM)

13. The Beginning (2006)
2012
1 agile team in
Project

14. 2013
6 agile teams
Technical Operations,
Optimization, Project,
Analytics, Sales Ops
& Digital Marketing

15. What is AgDM & AdDM?
AdDM (Adaptive Delivery
Methodology)
CSC flavor of agile
Scrum project management
framework
XP practices
Based on Lean principles
AgDM (Agile Delivery
Methodology)
best practices from cloud
based deployment
Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous Deployment (CD)
DevOps
Agile Delivery Acceleration
Platform (ADAP)

16. Next steps to scale

17. We scale both
deep and wide

18. After success
with Project,
ADM was rolled
out to
Operations &
Optimization

19. 3 month rollout:
Don’t overthink it,
start, inspect and
adapt

20. Next Up:
Analytics, Sales
Ops & Digital
Marketing
moved to ADM

21. Embrace
Difference and be
prepared to
stretch Agility

22. Wide scale has challenges,
scaling deep has more

23. Challenges

24. Managing
distributed and
matrix managed
teams

25. Scale with
values

26. One
Codeline

27. Product and Project
Dependencies

28. Leadership

29. Solutions

30. Scale Problem #1
Dependency Management is Hard
Dependency
Management
is Hard

31. Just
enough
structure
but no more

32. ADM Release Cycle (4-weeks)
Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan
Release
Coordinate release
planning with generic
framework
Planning cycle for
next release

33. Tools Help

34. But really, it’s the
people that make
things happen

35. And we make a big
investment in
collaboration

36. Maintain Technical Health
Debt is the Enemy

37. Create a
Single
Definition
of Done

38. Stop the codeline when test
failures are too high

39. Status
Metric
Now
(7/30)
Release
Criteria
Poten&ally
Releasable
Metrics
Feature
Freeze
Threshold
Basic
Ftest
100%
100.0%
Utest
100%
100.0%
Full
Ftest
100%
>99.8%
Extended
Ftest
96.86%
>99.75%
Basic
Selenium
99.76%
100.0%
Selenium
99.6%
>99.5%
Unresolved
IntegraCons
0
0
Strong
Attention to
metrics

40. Maintain team
focus

41. Hire for Values
and Culture Fit

42. Let’s go deeper

43. Case Study

44. Agile Program Management

45. Urgent change based
on new strategic
direction

46. The ugly baby

47. High Level
Goals
Design
& Priorities

48. Global Prioritized “Feature” backlog

49. Move teams
not
people

50. 6 Teams
Team 1 Team 2
Team 3
Team 5Team 4
Team 6

51. Launch &
Collaborate

52. Align to Workgroups
Workgroup 2
Team 4 Team 5
Team 6
Workgroup 1
Team 1 Team 2
Team 3

53. Collaboration is key (up, down, across)

54. Meet to realign
every day

55. Full Coordinated
Transparency

56. Visibility to Program feature priorities

57. Visibility to Workgroup feature priorities
Features Priority Status
Communities
1
SSO
2
Sharing model
3
Home page redesign
4
Workbench
5
Opportunity UI
6
Encryption
7
VF redesign
8
ICM support
9
OSS workflow
10
API
11

58. Program Dependencies
Delivering Team & Feature
Consuming Team &
Feature
May
June July
Team 2
Team 1
Something more
Something I want Team 5
HighMedLow
Risk
Done
Done – Delivered
Low – On track
Medium – Possible concerns/may miss deadline
High – Not scheduled, cannot deliver, or deadline missed
Feature at risk
Feature
Team 4
Team 4
Something I need Cool Feature
Team 3
Team 5Something else I
need
Another Cool
Feature
Monitor complexity &
maintain visibility

59. Lessons Learned

60. Be Bold
and
don’t go
Halfway

61. Don’t be satisfied,
always look for
things to improve

62. Stick to your principles
Trust the teams over
creating mandatory process
& structure

63. Agile does work at
scale
Lightweight structure
& more autonomy

64. Questions?