Adapting Agile for Enterprises (and getting more out of JIRA!)

Practical suggestions for Agile teams in enterprises.

Because Blended Perspectives is an Atlassian (JIRA) partner we have many clients who have adopted Agile but face challenges of how to blend Agile best practices with  project and program management disciplines.  The practical answer is to use the best of both.

Yet its one thing to write about and another to practically implement.  For instance if you subscribe to Disciplined Agile - conceptually there is a wider range of items in the backlog for a project than just epics and stories.  In other words the backlog acts as a big storage cupboard of not just stories and epics but also issues, risks and anything else that needs managing. If you are doing Scrum manually, this of course means adding a lot more stickies to your wall! So in enterprises, especially where there is a strong project management PMP style culture, its difficult to implement "pure Agile".

In  fact lets call a spade a spade.  Enterprise Agile teams typically  face  major problems and pressures. There are lots of real world compromises; 

• Not being able to release finished product in a meaningful environment
• Preconceived budgets that are unrelated to the backlog and team velocity
• Functional teams' (eg QA/Analysts) interests eclipsing the interests of the end product
• Product owners not being truly empowered to make quick decisions about their product

So there are two take-aways from this;

1 Teams will have many concerns that are impeding their adoption of Agile and its important to keep track of what those issues are and;

2 Teams in any case manage a lot more than epics, stories and bugs.   If  spreadsheets or other stand alone applications are used  to track deliverables, risks, issues etc, then Agile tool support is not strong enough.

To practically tackle the above we recommend clients, who use JIRA, create a set of standard issue types (in fact we renamed "issue" as "item").  These issue/item types can then be used to manage all the various enterprise demands. A standard set of templated item types could be;

• Milestone
• Deliverable
• Risk
• Issue
• Decision
• Status Report
• Project (Issue/item type is project)

JIRA (unlike other tools) allows you to include any of these items in your backlog and sprints. Its basically enhanced RAID meets Agile!   So in practice this means that items which cause drag on sprints and velocity can be acknowledged as being actually a part of the sprint.  Equally, these items don't have to be in any sprint and simply called up in JIRA as part of a filter. Either way this is deceptively simple but also very powerful because it significantly extends the capabilities of JIRA (and doesn't cost you more!).

An immediate benefit of this approach is that its possible to see  all the issues a range  of Agile projects are experiencing across a portfolio. You can get rid of spreadsheets to track risks and issues also.   Another tip is to create an issue/item type called "status" report.  This is a neat way to track status across all projects and records "point in time" history.  Some further recommendations;

• Set up standard item/issue types and schemes - avoid allowing projects to customize. This also allows for cross project portfolio analysis
• Avoid custom fields that are tied to temporary or organizational structures - when things change you just end up in a mess
• Invest in training - don't assume everyone just gets JIRA.  Execution in a team can be infinitely improved if they are doing the right things in the right way
• Overly complex workflows will annoy users and slow down adoption (keep it simple).  Avoid just open and shut workflows not everything is a bug.
• Ensure your RAID and other issue/item types use "issue linking" so that your epics and initiatives have greater context

Hope this is a useful contribution to the practical side of implementing Agile in a more disciplined enterprise context.  Future posts will tackle more specific techniques such as risk management.