Reformulating the Product Delivery Process

Reformulating the Product Delivery Process

Israel GatErik HuddlestonWalter BodwellStephen Chin

April 23, 2010

Lean/Agile has the demonstrated potential to drive high levels of productivity and quantifiable benefits for development organizations

Development

Dramatic Productivity Increases

Source: David Joyce; Kanban Results ; Lean and Kanban; October 24 2009

Release Freeze

Increased Release Frequency

Engineering time Reduction

Source: David Joyce; Kanban Results Part 3; Lean and Kanban; November 4 2009

Likewise, Inovis saw similar gains after a “big bang” rollout in 2008

QSMA, arespected consultancy on development productivity benchmarked Inovis against an industry database of over 7500 other projects.

However, the greater the success experienced in R&D, the more disruption that it creates for the organization as a whole

Product Management

Sales Marketing

Operations

SupportProfessional

Services

Launch Cycle Time > Dev Cycle Time

Feature selling becomes impossible (Sales Enablement)

Melting Change Managers: 50 changes once a month to 900 changes constantly

Supported Release proliferation

Innovator’s Dilemma

…in the weeds…

Development

5

“Eat your spinach or the Scrum will get you.”

However, by applying/extending those same lean/kanban principles more broadly in the organization, these risks can be avoided, and organizational value increased.

Three Atypical, but Critical Practices in the Product Portfolio Kanban:

• Stakeholder Based Investment Themes and Business Case Management (organizational value)

• Upstream and Downstream WIP Limits• Dynamic Allocations

Source: InfoQ

Source: InfoQ

Stakeholder Based Investment Themes and Business Case Management (organizational value)

Allocations and Strategic Investment Themes

Epics (offering or strategic initiative)

Features

Stories

Business Cases at Epic or Feature Level

Acceptance Criteria: Critical requirements for biz case realization (feature only) and needs for feature success (Feature and Story)

Organic Growth Initative

5

Cost Reduc-

tion20

New Market

35

Strategic Cus-tomer

25

Main-ten-ance10

Sales Directed5

8

We manage each business case through a Kanban which extends upstream and downstream from traditional development

- Proposed- Biz Case

- Backlogged- Long Term Roadmap

- Scheduled- Committed Roadmap

- In Process- Software development method in

use

- Deployed- Release Management

- Enabled- Collateral, Training

- Adopted- Marketing

- Usage

- Validated- Biz Case Analysis

- Feature Success Measurement

WL

WL

WL

WL

WL

WIP Limits

Kanban Stages Benefits

• Alleviate the “Agile Death Ray” Effect and Achieve Flow

• Expose and Route Around Political Roadblocks and Priority Alignment

• Focus Organizational Value Return

Capacity based

WIP limits

Item/slot based

WIP limits

OperationsProduct

Management Development

The Requirements Management and Kanban WIP Limits enable Organizational Value to be optimized dynamically based on real world organizational capacity and appetite

Sales Marketing

SupportProfessional

Services

Proposed

EnabledAdoptedValidated

EnabledAdoptedValidated

Bottleneck

Backlogged Scheduled In Process Deployed

What did success look like? One Example: Market Responsiveness“Inovis would not have succeeded if they were unable to deliver a staggering 200+ patches and releases to support our migration effort. No Inovis competitor could have done that.” --Michael Amend, Dell

Tactics/CapabilitiesHow was it executed? Here is the Lean Execution Engine

Continuous Build

ALM(Requirement

s Management)

SCM(Code

Management)

Test Execution

LRM(Lean Release Management)

Code Change DetectionMerg

e Management

Code

to F

eatu

re L

inkag

e Test to Feature LinkageB

ranch Managem

ent

Test Execution

Dynamic Roadmap

Gold Master SaaS Deployment

ContinuousImprovementFeedback

Artifact Mgmt

Components

Let’s take a look at a live Lean Portfolio Management System

Next Steps…What we are planning, how you can get started

Apropos Launch: May 22nd

Initial Version:• Commercial Friendly Open-

Source License• Support for Rally Community

Edition

Help Us:• Support other ALM platforms• Implement more portfolio

features and metrics

http://code.google.com/p/apropos/Project URL:

Contact:• Stephen Chin• Stephen.chin@inovis.com

Appendix

14

Demo Backup – Portfolio View

Demo Backup – Scope View

Demo Backup – Resource View

Demo Backup – Analyze View

Demo Backup – Roadmap View