Agile Transformation of a 1,000 people Programme

This particular Programme was a very large Waterfall Programme, with more than a 1,000 people that has been running for more than two years, and was having delays and all sort of issues, as it is common when trying to solve complex adaptive problems like this one and they are approached in a traditional way.

I was brought in by the Programme Director, in collaboration with Accenture, as a SAFe expert, to consult and propose a way to transform this programme into an Agile one.

One of the major problems this Programme faced was the lack of a single prioritized Backlog. There was a list of 2,000 requirements written and locked, more than two years ago, jealously controlled by the Change Management team, (as any change to these would imply a Change Request, with additional cost implications and would need to be approved by Senior Management). Each vendor had a high incentive to just deliver their subset of those 2,000 requirements, disregarding of whether they were still correct, valid or useful. Hence the Programme was in constant firefighting mode, with Senior Management being the only ones able to make prioritization or change decisions, and each decision implied that all vendor teams needed to change their GANTT charts and present them again to Management for approval as a new baseline.

After analysing and reviewing the current structures and ceremonies, we proposed an incremental plan to slowly start the Agile Journey. In order not to create massive disruption, and get buy in from entrenched traditional Management, we launched a pilot, with a small team, of about 12 people, that had almost no dependencies to other teams, in order to be able to experiment and adapt free from the Programme’s main processes. With the key goal of taking control of the team’s Backlog and able to re-prioritize it without the lengthy Change Management Process, and demonstrate the benefits of this approach.