The Amazing Team Race – A Team-Based Agile Adoption
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Add to calendarAn experience report (and video!) on the successful adoption and scaling of Agile practices within an IT organization through a year-long, innovative, and exciting campaign – the Amazing Team Race. This report shares successful strategies, some failed approaches, and finally how we created a culture of enthusiasm surrounding the adoption of Agile. It also demonstrates how widespread Agile adoption can be successful even in non-collocated team environments. The make-up of the IT organization consists of distributed teams with half of whom are outsourced contractors.
This session will be an overview of a year long challenge that was designed to help in the adoption and scaling of Agile practices within our organization. In 2008, a year after introducing Scrum into our organization, there was a clear need to create excitement around the adoption and scaling of Scrum within the development group. This lead us to develop what we called ‘The Amazing Team Race’ with the goal of scaling Scrum while recognizing and promoting behaviors of high performing teams.
The goals of the challenge were to:
Create awareness of team behaviors within our group
Showcase team practices
Create a healthy balance of leadership and employee-driven initiatives to foster acceptance of new process, roles and artifacts
Increased onshore & offshore adoption effectiveness
Less reliance on external coaches
Layout of our presentation:
We will leverage some of the jargon used from the Amazing Race show on CBS to situations that we experienced, such as: Route Markers, Roadblocks, U-Turns, Yield, etc.
Introduction- Paint clear picture of where we were in 2008 after a year of adopting Agile.
Amazing Team Race Sprint 0- Goal and setup for the different releases (route markers) of the challenge.
Amazing Team Race Sprint 1 - 4 – Examples of successful strategies and activities that were employed by our organization.
Amazing Team Race finale- Explain and demonstrate with a video where our organization ended for the year.
Retrospective- What worked well, what did not work as well.
Food for thoughts- Trends that we see in the adoption/scaling of Scrum.
Materials - Our presentation uses a PowerPoint deck with succinctly worded slides, and a Windows Media/Quicktime compatible music video montage on the finale of the Amazing Team Race. - Some personal work environment stories are used, with some light humor, to keep the talk lively. - The audience will be prompted at times for some of the challenges that they’ve faced and their suggestions/experiences. The presentation will be mildly adjusted to be sure to include any suggestions made or questions asked that need answers.
- • Strategies for scaling Agile Adoption across your entire IT organization.
- • Learn how to organically grow, encourage, and leverage Agile champions (coaches) within your organization.
- • Techniques to foster a team-based self-organizing approach even across widely distributed locations.
- • Inspire innovation and create enthusiasm in the adoption and use of Agile.
- • Sustain the successful implementation of Agile.