Interfacing Agile (SAFe) With Waterfall – Synchronization

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In our essay, Can Agile (SAFe) Be Interfaced With Waterfall?, we identified three major areas that had to be addressed so that a multiple inter-related programs with different management approaches didn’t turn into a train wreck.  Keeping related programs moving in the same direction is important, and synchronization is critical. In a recent interview for a future SPaMCAST Alan Shalloway, CEO of NetDynamics, reminded me that the more complicated we make work, the more we reduce flow and increase the probability of making mistakes. Staking the organization’s success to integrating two programs moving at different speeds is complicated. Synchronizing successfully requires spending time and money to keep the programs synchronized. Three effective techniques used to implement synchronization are:

 

Agile Where Agile Fears to Tread: Commercial Off The Shelf Packages

 

Packages come in all shapes and sizes!

 

Buying a package to perform a major function in an organization is rarely as easy as buying and implementing an app on your smartphone.  Package implementations often include:

 

Scrum of Scrum: Prerequisites and Structure

Scrum of Scrums are about the conversation!

The purpose and composition of a Scrum of Scrums (SoS) have been discussed in detail in earlier blog entries.As a means to scale, SoS has been leveraged as a structure for teams to coordinate and plan activities between each other.  The SoS is a platform for conversations such as negotiating access to a capacity from a team with specific skills or reminding everyone that you are refreshing the test environment in a few hours. The pattern of getting people together to coordinate with a structured approach in a time box is a powerful tool. That is why the base pattern has been tweaked and leveraged for many other purposes, some of which stray away from a few basics prerequisites:

1. You have to have more than one team. It is difficult to coordinate if no one else is involved.   Just because you are doing Agile or Scrum does not mean that you need to leverage a Scrum of Scrums. Don’t think this has not happened.
2. Participant teams need to interact with application or capability level.  Holding a Scrum of Scrums that have no functional or capability connection will devolve into a status meeting or worse.
3. Participants need to have a valid reason to plan and coordinate together.  Even if participants share an application, project, technology or capability, they still need a reason to plan, coordinate and negotiate together or the SoS will be a status meeting.
4. Participants must trust each other.  Without trust no real communication is possible.

A Scrum of Scrums is not a status meeting — the world does not need more status meetings.