Alexandre Cuva

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

My new agile adventure in Vietnam

Part 2

Since already 2 months I have been working in Vietnam with a Scrum Team. It is not only a short project, it is a huge project where I will be the main actor in the implementation of Agile practices, culture Hacking, Lean, Kanban and a lot more that I will have the chance to put in place.

So one of my Agile friends told me I should post on my Blog what's happened here.

So here I am Gael I start....

Once upon the time, there was a Freelance Agile Coach, who received a request from another friend : Alex I am working to create a new great Financial Company and I would like to have you to be part of this fantastic journey. Here the product... Are you In ? Of course that Product make sense to me I believe we can create a great company together with the two others. But in one condition, I want to manage my team in my way and have the Scrum teams in Vietnam.

My first job was to think about how we will manage Scrum teams in Vietnam and having most of the end customers back in Europe. Early in June I went to DARE 2013, great event about anything and Culture Haking with a lot of great people to meet. So there I meet Dean Leffingwell, author of two great books "Agile Software Requirements" and "Scaling Software Agility". So Dean presented a subject about the Scaling Software Agility. That was the subject I needed.

Dean in is presented, show us how to use Lean and Agile together and it makes sense. There are parts that Lean is great and make more sense than Scrum. Dean explains in Big company you have 3 phases:

  • 1st Layer "Portfolio Management", it is around Lean and Kanban
  • 2nd Layer "Program Management", some Lean, some Scrum and a Road Map around the features
  • 3rd Layer "Scrum Teams"
It depends then on the size the company.

That's it, I had the main ideas, ok my company is small, but it is highly distributed to the different office around the world and having a Scrum Product Manager for each office and a Scrum Master per team. It makes sense to me. The 1st Layer is too ambitious, but the 2 others are a good start.

To continue...