Agile Coaches' Corner Challenges with Large-Scale Software Delivery, with AgileThought Colleagues
In this week’s episode of Agile Coaches’ Corner, Dan Neumann is joined by two of his colleagues at AgileThought — the Vice President of Build Practice, Taylor Howard; and the Vice President of Transform Practice, Steven Granese.
Taylor’s work with Build Practice involves supporting the absolute best practitioners in the business — including Data Scientists, Architects, Delivery Leaders, Engineers, and Analysts with multiple technical competencies and domain experience. Taylor and his team translate business strategy into a technical roadmap, delivering cloud-first and hybrid solutions at a global scale. Steven’s work with Transform Practice is focused on organizational consulting. They help their clients figure out the right way to work, the right product to build, how to implement Agile ways of working, and DevOps (i.e., how to get that software that the teams have created to the production environment and make sure it’s stable, scalable, and secure).
Today, Taylor and Steven will be discussing the challenges with large-scale software delivery and how to overcome them. With scaling comes a whole different set of challenges so Taylor and Steven not only outline many of the challenges their clients are facing today but some of the challenges they’re facing internally, at AgileThought, as they scale themselves.
Key Takeaways
- Challenges with scaling:
- Understanding what the business outcomes are that the client is looking for
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- Aligning the stakeholders to make sure that they truly understand each other’s vision and are speaking the same language
- Making sure that the teams are coordinated (i.e. everyone is headed towards the same goal and they’re being measured in the same way)
- The danger of issues getting buried
- The ways teams interact (or don’t interact) with each other
- Getting connected to your customer
- Making sure there’s alignment with the objective that’s to be achieved
- How to address these challenges:
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- Implement Agile ways of working
- Look at areas that need improvement and have active feedback cycles
- Use data to support all the teams (to either replicate the good or improve the not-so-good), bringing them to the same level with more predictable outcomes
- Be transparent, inspect, and adapt
- Embrace a culture of curiosity and ask questions about the data
- Blame the system; not the person
- Leaders need to make sure the system is healthy so the teams have what they need and can be freed up to do what they do best — build software
- More time needs to be spent communicating the dependencies
- Lots of feedback loops and channels for communication
- Be pragmatic in delivery
- Align to the larger vision
- Moving from an “us/them” mentality to a “we” mentality (amongst the teams)
- Mentioned in this Episode:
- Taylor and Steven’s Book Picks
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