CONSULTING SERVICES
Many organizations need support during the transitioning from waterfall development to agile software development methodology. Many times they need customized Agile Process than theoretical approach to achieve technical and business agility using principles of agile, scrum, extreme programming(XP), kanban or hybrid approach. Hence they require training and coaching, expert advice and suggestions in piloting, handling challenges faced during the agile transformation at team and enterprise level.
For many organisations scaling agile at teams, programs and portfolios becomes even more challenging. ExelPlus founder Niranjan with his vast experience, expertise and leadership provides consulting, coaching, training and implementation support adopting agile, scaling agile successfully at team level and for enterprise level adoption to achieve Technical and Business Agility.
“Better product quality, higher customer satisfaction, improved team morale, increased collaboration and ownership among team members, improved visibility and control, better release predictability”
Following are the areas of consulting, coaching and advisory services provided by ExelPlus
Agile/Scrum Implementation
Scrum Implementation – Coaching and Mentoring
In agile, Scrum is one of the most popular approaches to develop products and services iteratively and incrementally.
Our Approach
At ExelPlus, we provide coaching and mentoring for software and non-software organizations to get the following benefits to their businesses:
- Faster time to market/deployment for new products and services
- Incremental working solutions developed frequently and early to meet the customer needs (value creation)
- Ability to adapt to a fast changing environment (respond to change)
We believe effectiveness of Scrum deployment depends more on Being Scrum than Doing Scrum. We help organizations to help deploy Scrum process effectively with following roles:
- Product Owner
- Scrum Master
- Scrum Team
Agile Project Management (Scrum/XP/Kanban Practices)
The ExelPlus provides consultancy, coaching services on definition of customizable agile process in your organization, consisting integration with essential technical and management practices which is hybrid model with a mix of Scrum, Extreme programming (XP) and Kanban practices. Our consultants will coach and train you by defining the customizable agile model, after doing an initial assessment on process followed in software delivery.
Some the essential technical practices from XP include techniques such as:
- How to deploy continuous integration system for builds
- Refactoring of design and code
- Collective code ownership
- Defining test automation and test driven development practices
- Usage of unit testing and acceptance testing tools
- Pair programming practices
Essential management practices include:
- Setting up governance model and setting up Agile PMO
- Defining Agile Metrics
- DevOps
- Portfolio management
Kanban system helps agile projects to monitor effectively work in process and bring more visibility into management.
Our consultants will help in:
- Defining work flow states – Kanban Board
- Monitoring progress using Kanban Board
- Training and Coaching team in effective usage of Kanban
Transitioning to Agile Successfully
Some organizations require support in transitioning to agile methods successfully from the traditional methods to develop their products and services. We help such organizations to adopt agile successfully by providing Transformation Roadmap and coaching teams with following steps:
- Conducting Agile readiness assessments
- Piloting
- Identifying the improvement areas
- Monitor effectiveness of agile
- Transition to agile completely
Agile Readiness Assessments
As the usage of agile methods becoming wide spread, the effectiveness of implementation of these agile practices in projects, organizations become more important for success of agile. We conduct Agile readiness assessments at the start and periodically to assess the completeness of following agile practices:
- Development Practices/ Infrastructure
- Iteration Planning/ Tracking
- Product Ownership
- Release Planning/ Tracking
- Team cohesiveness(collaboration)
- Agile Testing Practices
Scaled Agile for Enterprises (SAFe)
Scaled Agile Framework – An Overview
SAFe™ – the Scaled Agile Framework ® – is an increasingly popular and proven approach for implementing lean and agile practices at enterprise scale and defined by Dean Leffingwell, the approach uses elements of Lean thinking, Agile development techniques and concepts of Product Development Flow. After several field experiences at Enterprise Scale in many organizations, SAFe has evolved into a broad and detail framework of guidance and it can be accessed at www.scaledagileframework.com
Product development at enterprises involves multiple teams, synchronization of product vision, planning and interdependencies to continuously deliver value to customer at sustainable pace. Multiple teams have to work together to deliver on demand from the market needs. In SAFe , this is done defining, identifying portfolios to various programs (E-Commerce, CRM, and Inventory Management Streams etc). Each program may have separate multiple teams to fulfill the program back log requirements and have to deliver the product releases as and when needed.
SAFe works well and effectively adopted to 50-100 team members working on a product with multiple agile teams. It provides transformation roadmap to execute and manage portfolios, using lean thinking principles moving away from the traditional mindset of managing portfolios in enterprises. It strongly believes in having a centralized strategy and local decision making. Any enterprise should have centralized strategy at portfolio level for funding investments based on the market, business needs and localized execution at programs level. This is achieved in SAFe with multiple agile teams work separately with fixed 2 weeks iterations developing on cadence, and synchronizing at program level to deliver Potential Shippable Increments (PSIs) solutions every 8-10 weeks, continuously delivering value to the customers. Hence SAFe brings close connection between Portfolios, Programs and Teams responsible for deliveries. It brings close involvement of Senior Leadership at portfolio level (VP, SVP, CTO, CXOs etc) to release management, product management responsible for product vision, road map, release planning and then to the implementation multiple agile teams where all are synchronized and aligned to deliver solutions on demand.
Scaling agile at enterprises in SAFe consists of:
1) Capable Agile teams (Team Level)
2) Scaling to Program Level
3) Scaling to Portfolio Level
Implementing Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
We provide the following consultancy services by coaching, guidance and mentoring support to implement SAFe in your Organization.
Coach, Train and Certify SAFe Agilist certification programs
We train and certify your executives, managers, change agents and also who are interested to gain necessary knowledge and guidance to adopt Scaled Agile Framework in their enterprises, with lean and product development principles. These certifications are approved by the Scaled Agile Academy.
Coaching to apply Scrum,Lean and XP practices at team and program levels
We train and certify developers, testers, project managers, product managers, business analysts, dev ops people to apply Scrum, Lean , XP Technical practices for scaling agile in an enterprise point of view and apply Scaled Agile Framework at the team and program levels and also to get SAFe Practitioner certification which is approved by Scaled Agile Academy.
Coaching Managers, Executives on Lean thinking and transformational patterns
We can come to your organization and coach your managers, executives on Lean thinking and transformational patterns by moving away from the traditional mindset of product management for delivering solutions at demand with sustainable pace of delivery for various portfolios, multiple releases and teams in Enterprise context. We will coach them to adopt practices, roles, activities and artifacts of the Scaled Agile Framework. These Managers after training will focus on developing their people, so that their people develop solutions at sustainable pace.
Facilitation and Launching Agile Release Train Quick Start Programs
The “Program Execution” is very important for any successful releases and is done in the form of “Release Trains” in SAFe. Hence in order to get the full benefit , your people may require coaching on how to launch Agile Release Trains at program level as it requires coaching and training from Experts like SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) who is well versed in Scaled Agile Framework. This is going to be 5 day immersion program for team members who are all part of Release Trains.
Portfolio Planning, Governance Model ,Agile project management Office
We can come to your organization and work with your executives, product management and release management people to identify portfolios, defining portfolio vision, Invest themes, Value streams, Product road maps, Business Epics and Architecture Epics. We can also work with your people to define governance model with objective agile metrics at all levels(Portfolio metrics, Program level Metrics and Team Level metrics) and help to set up Agile Project Management Office(PMO).