RE: An inquiry about VersionOne's capability to model different kinds of activities for achieving organization-wide agile

[John Boyd]

Thanks for this model picture !


John L. Boyd

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Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2012 02:01:16 -0700
From: jarn...@gmail.com
To: versiono...@googlegroups.com
Subject: An inquiry about VersionOne's capability to model different kinds of activities for achieving organization-wide agile

Greetings,

I am an independent consultant, helping companies of different sizes

and in different stages towards organization-wide adoption of agile.

In my experience, while success in agile transformation leans heavily

upon changing the mindsets, the organization, the ways of working, , and

even the ways of doing business, the tools used for backlog management

can make or break the case. 

In other words, once the organization and the mindsets are poised for change, not having to struggle with tools is of

paramount importance.

I'm currently looking at both commercial and open source agile management tools,

in order to figure out what would be simple, yet powerful enough to meet the needs I perceive my clients are having. I'm hoping that 

by learning the ins and outs of a selected, good-enough tool and

then suggesting it to my clients when the need arises, I could make my practice more

effective.

Based on my experience in consulting and coaching

software organizations, both agile and otherwise, I have formulated a set of needs that a good agile tool should meet. 

To me, the most important requirement is the flexibility of the tool to model the entire set of activities that take up time from the people. Because non-project activities can take up to 50% of the time of the development people, I see "plain vanilla agile project management" with a product, release and iteration backlog as only a subset of what a good tool must be able to handle. 

While features such as attachments, version control integration, access rights and so on can be useful, not having all the activities represented in the tool (to a suitable accuracy, of course) makes real change harder.

I'm hoping - as you probably know your tool inside out - you could help me

get a quick start in understanding how your solution might meet the needs of my clients.

The tools that I've, based on some Googling, chosen for the

'first wave' of my evaluation are VersionOne, Rally, Jira+Greenhopper,

Agilefant (open source) and IceScrum (open source / freemium). You

can in the near future find this same post - or at least, a similar one - on their community forums.

The picture below sums up my evaluation framework; the three first

(simpler!) cases are also further explained below; while there are not too many people in these organizations, they in my opinion sum up nicely the practical challenges involved. I'll be elaborating the rest of the cases in writing if I need to.

All of the organizations explained here are based on my former or

current clients. Also, in all of these cases, traditional physical

wallboard solutions were ruled out for different reasons. For example, in the first, single-person Freelance Expert case, there are multiple 'offices' from which the expert worked from, while in the other cases, at least some of the workers in the organization were seldom all co-located due to various reasons.

You might of course comment that these cases are not "pure agile". But, this is what I see is the reality is more or less like, even in the most "agile" of the organizations I've worked with, and a good tool should be able to first accommodate to reality, then help change it.

The Freelance Expert (1 person)

-------------------------------------------

The 'Freelance expert' is dealing with the activity types

of 'Product development', 'Tech adm', 'Customer support', 'Consulting,

'Sales & biz adm' and 'General adm'. While 'Consulting' in this case

is mostly conducted as projects that adhere to a basic scrum

framework, 'Product development' is a continuous activity, with single

stories being pulled from a long product backlog, and releases

happening constantly whenever something valuable gets done.

'Tech adm', 'Customer support', 'Sales & biz adm' and 'General adm'

are all continuous activities, which means that project-like start and

end dates having little meaning. In these activities, new stories and

tasks pop up on an as-needed basis, with certain stories and/or tasks

recurring periodically.

From all of these project and non-project activities, the Freelance

Expert must evaluate which

stories and tasks are the most important to attend to "right now", and

which can be left for later. In an optimal case, the tool would have a

single view which aggregates all the Stories and Tasks from all

ongoing activities, the workload they implicate, and leave the

Freelance Expert the final choice of what tasks to tackle first.

How would you suggest the Freelance Expert to model his work in your tool?

The Micro Organization (3 people)

--------------------------------------------

The three-person micro organization consists of two

technical people, and the founder/CEO. The technical duo takes care of

product development (with the founder/CEO being the product owner),

which is conducted as two-week sprints, each ending in a minor public

release. The stories are pulled from the backlog of a major release,

which is due quarterly, and in addition to to this release backlog,

the product owner is constantly fleshing out the next upcoming release

in a separate release backlog. Thus, the product backlog contains all

the the feature ideas (etc.) that are not yet seen as important to be

included in either the currently ongoing or the up-next release.

Consulting is done as projects, with some consulting projects

consisting of iterations of a length agreed upon with the customer,

while other consulting projects do not have iterations. All consulting

projects are performed by a single responsible person.

Both the Tech duo as well as the founder/CEO take care of customer

support. While there are multiple customers, customer support entails

a single backlog of stories, prioritized by the founder/CEO.

Except for these, all the other activities (Tech adm, General adm as

well as Sales) are, similar to the above described single-person

Freelance Expert, "continuous activities", with stories and tasks

popping up every now and then, as well as periodically.

How would you suggest the Micro Organization to model their activities

in your tool?

The Very Small Organization (7 people)

--------------------------------------------------

In the seven-person very small organization there are two "teams": the

five-person Tech team, and the two-person Business duo. Tech adm,

General adm are done as in the Micro Organization case.

Sales & business administration consist of both a 'continuous

activity' (like before), as well as projects, with each project

entailing a preparation of a response of a call to offer. While these

are relatively straightforward with no iterations needed, they are

labour-intensive, with each response taking about a man-week to

prepare. Some offers are responded to by Both of the members of the

business duo, while others are not.

One member of the Business duo is technically capable (as well as the

original programmer of the product), and as a Scrum-like product owner

for Product development - which is handled similarly to the Micro

Organization case described above. The other, more senior and

extremely-well networked member of the business duo does not follow

the progress of product development so closely (and many of the

iteration-level user stories have little meaning to him), he needs, in

order to perform sales effectively (which he otherwise is very good

at!), to stay aware of the progress of the bigger features the

iteration-level stories contribute to.

Like in the previous cases, consulting is conducted as projects.

However, this time each consulting project is performed by one of the

members of the business duo, as well as from one to three members of

the Tech team, depending on the size and importance of the consulting

project in question. As a general rule, consulting projects 'override'

product development in terms of importance, and often consulting

projects cause the need of new features to be developed. Some of these

new features are conducted as part of the consulting project, while

others are inserted into the backlog of the ongoing or up-next

release, depending on the urgency and the willingness of the

particular customer to pay for the feature's development.

How would you suggest the Very Small Organization to model their

activities in your tool?

======================

OK, so that's it for now. Like said, I'll elaborate the more complex

cases illustrated in the picture linked above once I've got these cases

covered!

Eagerly waiting for any advice you might have,

Jarno

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[Waddell, Brook]

As long as you have something like “All Projects” selected, you should be fine.  Since team members are dynamically identified by the stories they are associated with, you should be able to see what they need to work on across projects.  In addition to this, if you are a supervisor and want to watch stories / tasks for a select group of people (Regardless of team affiliation), you can create Member Groups.

 

Hope this helps!

 

From: versiono...@googlegroups.com [mailto:versiono...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jarno Vähäniitty
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 2:57 PM
To: versiono...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: An inquiry about VersionOne's capability to model different kinds of activities for achieving organization-wide agile

 

OK, I admit that's a bit of an epic question to answer.

Let me simplify things; suppose I have
- two teams A and B
- four projects (say, 1 2 3 and 4), concerning different products
- A and B work together on 1
- A works on 2
- B and two team members from A work on 3
- one member from B and two members from A work on 4

...can this be modeled in VersionOne, and if, then how? Can I view what stories & tasks each team member has to take care of?

Yeah, not fully agile on all aspects, but this is what real life is often like. 

All of the organizations explained here are based on my former or

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/versionone-users/-/VOTMMgmKMBIJ.