Introducing Agile And Lean Principles And Practices To A Chaotic Environment

Session Type: Experience Report with Question and Answers / Panel Discussion
Submitters: DanRough and RobBowley

Overview

Following on from an experience report done in June at the Extreme Tuesday Club, we will be running a session to discuss the changes that we have implemented and lessons that we’ve learned over the last 12 months in moving from what can be described as a chaotic environment to one which uses agile and lean practices.

This isn’t just an Experience Report from a Developers perspective though, the people who will be attending will not only include developers, but a representative from our Sales Team and hopefully our CEO or CTO too.

Dan and Rob work for 7digital.com, the UK’s leading digital media delivery company. You can read more about us here

Objectives

To provide an open and honest account as to the successes we’ve had and the challenges that we’ve faced in the implementing the practices and most importantly, what we’ve learnt along the way.

We hope also to highlight the fact that it is possible to implement a vanilla version of a process and then that through a focus on self organisation, it is possible to establish teams that constantly evolve the processes that they are using. We will present what was a snapshot of our processes after 6 months and then contrast those with a current snapshot of our working practices.

As the people presenting this though, we also hope to get some feedback on the practices that we’re using so our understanding of what we could be applying can improve.

Timetable

The session will take the structure below:

• 5 minutes introductions to Participants from 7digital and explanation of format
• 5 minutes providing context, history of organisation, history of Development Team within organisation; Reference to previous Experience Report
• 10 minutes presenting current working practices
• Rest of Time would be allocated to Questions and Answer session which would be facilitated to ensure that all members of the panel were given an opportunity to input and that subject matter was sufficiently varied.

Participants

2 Developers (Panel)
CEO / CTO (Panel)
1 Salesperson (Panel)
1 Facilitator

Intended Audience

This Experience Report is applicable to all but in particular those that are using or considering using agile and lean practices in an environment which does not presently or has not historically  had structured processes in place (such as waterfall).