Where to go for the presentation
Mike’s blog: http://www.leadingagile.com
Who is Mike Cottmeyer?
• Have been on the VersionOne service team for about 8 months
• Prior to joining VersionOne I was a Senior Project Manager for CheckFree Corporation in Atlanta, GA
• This experience report is about a very large initiative I managed a few years ago
Who is CheckFree?
• CheckFree is the leading provider of online banking and bill payment services to the banking and financial services industry
• We were building services that would enable CheckFree to provision a custom bill payment website for a major customer in less than 90 days
Just how big was that project?
• The largest of these initiatives was planned to take over a year and half
• The project had over 70 people involved from concept to delivery and was estimated at over 10,000 ideal engineering hours and delivered for about 30,000 real hours
What else could we do to make it hard?
• And… we were using an Indian offshore development team for a significant part of the work
Take a moment…• Imagine you are the leader of
a development organization, maybe a senior project manager
• Your senior leader comes to you and says you’ve got to cut costs
• He tells you the company has entered into an agreement with an offshore dev firm
The Realization
• You still have 100% of your projects to complete
• Half of your new team is over 8500 miles away and separated by a 9 or 10 hour time zone difference
• Not a great environment to be Agile
My take…• Not a big fan of taking
teams offshore• These projects are very
challenging and delivering the right product requires a huge investment of time and money
• Often don’t realize the cost savings you expect going in
Call to Action
• If you find yourself in this situation, you have to find away to make it work
• Failing to deliver is not an option
• There are too many examples of offshore projects that have failed from poor requirements, lack of management oversight, and failure to communicate
The Agile contract
• Only specify what can be specified– Tooling– Core competencies– Key personnel/retention– Forecasting– Sprint planning– Service levels
Working as One Team
• Teamwork– Mix onshore and
offshore people– Rotate the offshore
team members between on shore and offshore
Metrics and Tooling
• Measure everything– Team velocity– Individual
velocity– Project burndown– Major milestones
Lessons Learned• Offshore required more
doc• Put a greater burden on
the onshore team• Found we had to be
more prescriptive• Yesterday’s weather
didn’t work• Stretch goals and
Turnover
Key Takeaways
• Offshore only if you have to
• Agile can help you be more successful
• Provides an ability to guide the project into an acceptable outcome
• Adapt processes
Where to go for the presentation
Mike’s blog: http://www.leadingagile.com