- Lack of demand funnel.
- Program level prioritisation is cowboy-style individual feat (in that the heavyweights have significant say) than a collective exercise.
- Leadership may not be democratic and likely non-aligned with goals and aspirations of teams.
- Constant team flux, changes, team-movement.
- Frequent ways of working model changes.
- Poorly defined feedback mechanisms for contractors.
- Perception-based judgements.
- Over-reliance on business analysts who double up as iteration managers.
- Not an open culture in some teams, and fear lurking on the flanks with respect to team bigwigs.
- Last but not the least, Business agility is still in the stone age.
- IM / SM with NIIT.
- IT Process and Tools consultant with TechM - was SM / IM in Telstra.
- Model and non-model (custom, ISO, CMMI, SPICE, etc.), frameworks
- Tool consulting - Rational Tools, HP QC / ALM
- Incident and problem management.
- Alert and escalation management.
- Last project was with IAG as IM/SM/TM.
- Project manager dictating terms, taking statuses, attending daily stand-ups, derailing stuff.
- Third party testing team that didn't get along well with the development team.
- Testing team didn't communicate about the "bugs" but would go and log them on Jira, and send out a bug status report in the evening. Those bugs ended up being discussed in the daily stand ups.
- Testing team refused to be collocated with the development team.
- Line managers attending the daily stand ups.
We are scoring well on customer-centricity (first pillar), lean portfolio management (2nd pillar – in the form of frontdoor request management / demand funnel management), Organizational design (third pillar)
Delivery framework and Agile mindset is broken. Funding has been a consistent challenge leading to unpredictability and anxiety among teams. As well as a never-ending restructuring in addition to lack of psychological safety (teams are summarily dismissed if something goes wrong).
Leadership and Culture – we have gone back to waterfall ways of working and there has never been an Enterprise Agility drive aimed to promote agile mindset in Westpac leadership.
6th Pillar is not applicable as it is directly related to leadership
& culture.
- Lack of Enterprise
Business Agility particularly, Executive Agility as well as Business Agility is lacking, therefore we are
chasing anti-agile patterns like
i.
Freezing requirements instead of baselining and
engaging with Business.
ii.
Over-Documentation
iii.
Increase in meetings with management for
providing management updates.
iv.
Classical reporting and duplication of reporting
at multiple places.
v.
Belief that process will fix things
instead of an Inspect & Adapt way of working. (12 step process for
example).
vi.
Chasing Agile Badges, achieving which does
nothing to speed up delivery or increase efficiency or increase customer
satisfaction.
vii.
Business doesn’t participate during initial
project phases.
- Lack of a defined
funding model
i.
Every team is keen to “figure out its next
meal”, which is sustaining by getting Clarity allocation. This survival mode
ensures there is no scope for focus on improvements or better delivery.
- Extremely slow
delivery-to-market owing to following waterfall ways of working and
lack of agility. Most projects take anywhere between 3 to 6 months or
more to get into production. So the feedback loop is extremely delayed.
- Rigid and few
deployment slots
available for DDEP. Therefore, automation or
other ways to speed up delivery will be counterproductive until
this bottleneck is resolved.
- There is no
pre-production environment.
- There is no real SIT
happening and the SIT that happens is simply a superset of ST, but not
really an integration test.[Sudhakar, Vijay ]
SIT there is
no scenario-based testing happening.
- Lack of test data.
Mocking of data is not always effective.
- Sometimes end to end
testing doesn’t happen or happens after prod deployment (TTR; there may
be specific program challenges.)
- There is no defined ways of working to engage Solution Teams. I have proposed a practice similar to how we engage Data governance team.
- Impacted teams/technologies
All teams in are affected.
- Solution
- Either implement
Classical waterfall OR implement Agile, but not a combination of both.
- If it is Agile, then
there is a need to have agile practitioners on the ground. However since
both Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters have been removed from the teams, I
am not sure whether this is even an option or what exactly Westpac
intending to do.
- Reduce documentation:
- Based on the project
budget, define the extent of documentation required by projects.
- Have extremely clear
communication about teams offboarding/ onboarding instead of teams having
to figure out themselves (for example, the entire Change Team from
Financial crime will be taken over by the IBM team, however there was very poor
and conflicting communication leading to confusion and chaos).
- Define ways to achieve
agility in data space by defining how work can be broken down to
manageable and deliverable entities.
- Have frequent deliveries
to production to get faster feedback from business.
- Reduce practice of
trying to document plans and having to keep them updating to reflect
reality.
- Reduce the culture of
Risk (having to raise risk for everything) and escalation (notion that
things will move if escalated).
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