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Tuesday, November 11, 2014 at 9:24am.
AgilePDX: Does DAD Know Best, Is it Better to do LeSS or Just be SAFe? Adapting Scaling Agile Practices into the Enterprise
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This month, Aashish Vaidya will be reprising his well attended PNSQC 2014 talk and providing additional content his time slot at the conference did not allow him to cover.
Organizations, large and small, that are experimenting and succeeding in using agile practices at team level, face their next challenge in scaling these practices across the enterprise. This challenge can come from expanding pilot programs from handful of teams to more teams; or, it comes from agile teams working with non-agile parts of the organization. The process inevitably creates confusion as teams employing different methods interface with each other. Are there large scale practices that work in easing the interaction between agile teams, and other non-agile, semi-agile business units? While scaling, can an organization get too process heavy and risk losing the original intent of transitioning to agile practices? There are primarily three scaling frameworks that try to address scaling agile practices: Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Each of these frameworks draws from variety of agile and lean practices. However, an organization’s context matters most in deciding whether to embrace particular framework or only select practices to obtain desired results. In most cases, an organization has to make informed, pragmatic choices and experiment with various practices.
Cambia Health Solutions has for over three years rolled out Scrum and other agile practices across more than 40 development oriented teams. For Cambia, scaling practices, articulated in scaling frameworks, such as enterprise-wide synchronized Sprints, multi-program Quarterly Release Planning, Scrum of Scrums and Communities of Practices, have been effective in organizing our work. Many of these practices can prove useful not only to larger, but also to smaller ones, who are looking to improve and refine their adaption of agile practices.
Aashish Vaidya is a Staff Consultant at Cambia Health Solutions, parent company of The Regence Group, a not-for-profit, Health Insurance Company. He works on large portfolio projects, and serves as an internal Agile and Quality coach. He is a founding member of Cambia’s Enterprise Transition Community, Agile Best Practices Exchange and the Software Quality Best Practices Exchange. Aashish has over 20+ years of industry experience working in various leadership and management positions for companies such as Compaq, Intel, Kronos Incorporation, and other IT companies. Aashish has been a presenter and a panelist for Technology Association of Oregon, AgilePDX, RoseCity SPIN and PNSQC. He has been practicing Agile for over 7 years and holds Scrum Practitioner and ScrumMaster certifications. He is a co-author of 2 articles on AgileAtlas.org on Scrum common practices and he maintains an infrequent blog on Agile and Management topics at agilesutra.wordpress.com. Aashish holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University.