Fictional XYZ company has recognized their software development projects have not generated their estimated value for the past 5 years. Their data suggests that 20% of projects fail to deliver software to production. Of the 80% that do deliver software, 70% of the projects to complete on time and none of the projects came in under budget. XYZ company follows a traditional waterfall model as shown in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1:

Waterfall Model

Note: This figure represents the life cycle of a waterfall model used in software development processes. From “Waterfall vs. V-Model vs. Agile: A comparative study on SDLC” Balaji, S., & Murugaiyan, M. S. (2012, International Journal of Information Technology and Business Management, p. 27).

As shown above, XYZ company’s process follows these stages step by step: Analysis, Design, Development, Testing, Implementation and Maintenance. Once the requirements are established the analysis stage begins where the requirements are analyzed. After the analysis, the system architecture and design are specified in the design stage. In the next stage the development part of the process is completed. Once the process enters the testing stage, all the components and units developed in the previous stage are tested. Once testing is complete without any bugs, the project is then deployed in the deployment stage. In the maintenance stage any issues that occur in the user end are fixed and the product is kept up to date to new updates.

In waterfall model all the project requirements are made clear before the analysis and design stages. Because the stages are fixed, changes in requirements are not implemented once out of the design stage. Every other stage of the model also begins and ends in a particular order. Each stage also has an assigned timeframe and is locked before moving toward the next stage. As an example, the analysis phase is locked before the design stage begins, and once the design is locked, development begins, and so forth (Balaji & Murugaiyan, 2012). The teams involved in other stages of the process are only involved when their stage begins. For example, the test team is only involved once the testing stage begins. Since the test team is not involved in the process from the beginning any defects that might have occurred in the earlier stages are found very late in the development process, which makes this model expensive and time consuming (Balaji & Murugaiyan, 2012).

Further research by the XYZ company found related material on the challenges of waterfall. According to McManus & Wood-Harper (2007), industry information was gathered on completions, cancellations, and project overruns of several companies using waterfall methodology. Out of 214 companies sampled, 51 (23.8%) were canceled, 163 were completed (76.2%). Based on the research the reason for cancellations and project overruns were due to management decisions and poor communication when it comes to finalizing proper business requirements. Even though the success rate was 76.2 %, many of the projects were behind schedule and over budget. For example, one of the companies that was 20 weeks late and 56% over budget was still considered successful only due to completion (2007).

XYZ company has decided to replace their waterfall development methodology with an agile one. To do this effectively, they have created a task force to support the implementation of agile for their software development processes. More specifically, as they work with multiple teams and dependencies, their goal is to implement SAFe, a scaled agile framework for managing multiple agile development teams (Scaled Agile, 2022).

The task force has proposed that XYZ company start with a small implementation with the task force acting as a coaching/consulting team while the necessary skills and rituals are implemented. For the task force to be successful, critical roles and skills are necessary. These include, but are not limited to, Business Analysts, Software Engineers, Agile coaches for Organizing Teams, and Data Analysts to measure the progress.

The task force is starting with the following goals to establish criterion for a successful implementation. These are based on a published case study for a company with a similar profile. The 6-month goals are as follows (Scaled Agile, 2022):

· 100% increase in software delivered to production

· 40% decrease in support tickets for production software

· 25% increase in employee satisfaction

As you will notice, the metrics for success are NOT related to the project metrics stated in the summary. The reason for this is the outcome is not more successful projects, but value delivered by software going to production. The project metrics stated in the summary highlighted the issue was the project management methodology, therefore the task force decided not to improve on those metrics as the analysis showed the data for the new agile delivery model to be incompatible.

The task force will start with the implementation of SAFe in the following steps.

1. Establish and execute a training plan

2. Coach and support two teams in the use of SAFe

3. Evaluate the progress based on the already stated metrics and adjust accordingly

4. After six months, decide as to the next steps with the goal of either dissolving or evolving the task force based on need after one year.

The XYZ company has identified several risks that include not just the success of the task force but also the overall implementation of Agile & SAFe.

Trust is the key to any successful delivery. The agile manifesto explains things that help a great deal with overcoming this critical issue. Agile methodology helps with empowering the team with trust in people than process. In addition to building trust among team members, it is equally important to have trust between customers. Complimenting this, the agile manifesto says customer agreements do not have to be comprehensive, but they can be stated project frameworks with delivery objectives. The important thing is all parties agree on a common goal with some flexibility. Embracing changes as the goes in the motto for Agile. Agile helps build a lot of trust and collaboration within the team (Petren, 2012).

Communication is the key to development, either professionally or personally. However, a lot of teams struggle with this issue. Agile brings business teamwork with the development team together and makes periodically progressive as the project proceeds. Agile helps eliminate any business-level misunderstanding that may occur during the development. The agile process asks for daily standups where teams discuss their daily operation and call out impediments. Agile brings the entire team together and leads to very few chances of miscommunication or misunderstanding of requirements. Traditional projects management values documentation, whereas the Agile management process measures success with software quality. A critical step of the agile methodology is to set up retrospective calls to analyze the process, identify the risks, and develop a plan to overcome the issues faced in the current iterations. All Agile promotes is to keep everyone in the team involved with every activity in the project and remove dependencies for better performance.

A rigid environment is one of the most significant limitations of traditional project management. Agile gives unlimited flexibility. Agile will not have strict rules other than ensuring that the team is on the right path for delivery. In the midway of the project, any compliance policy or other essential factor requirements can be changed even if the total project design can be changed from scratch. Building a team-like task force may require making many changes, and Agile keeps it flexible with any unaccountable challenges when the project is started. With this team, efficiency can be improved without wasting a lot of resources. (Lazar, 2020)

Many traditional projects failed due to the single person taking responsibility for delivering the project. In contrast, Agile methodology believes in valuing every team member's participation in requirements, progress, and delivery. Agile gives more power to individual team players, which helps them to grow professionally. Great power always comes with significant responsibilities. This creates an incredibly supportive and open-minded environment that helps make many innovative ideas and develop creative solutions. (Lazar, 2020).

These risks will be consistently present throughout the implementation and will be revisited as part of the rollout. To build a team-like task force, we must stay accountable for many such challenges and potential risks, including those not mentioned above. The agile process stays flexible enough to overcome these issues and gives high productivity.

The task force will hire external agile consultants to successfully implement SAFe among the teams. Among the resources to hire, the most critical is the Agile coach. The agile coach will guide and train the team on Agile best practices throughout the implementation of SAFe (Lyssa Adkins, 2010). Agile coaches will help the team to effectively adopt SAFe methodology. Under the coach guidance the teams will start working in a scrum team with five to nine individuals who work toward completing the development projects and delivering products. The coach also leads workshops to teach agile concepts to the team.

Scrum master and a Business Analyst will be hired to work with the development teams to analyze the systems and come up with a plan of action to adopt agile best practices. SM will help team members to stay on track with scrum techniques. The BA will work with the task force to organize the requirement documents in the user story format. This will help the team to divide their work in different iterations/sprints. BA will also host Jira bootcamps, where the team will learn to basic of the tool and how to leverage it for tracking tasks and all work items. The task force will have the team go through an implementation training by Certified SAFe Program Consultants.

Agile: Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches (Atlassian, 2022).

SAFe: Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprises (SAFe) is a knowledge base of proven, integrated principles, practices, and competencies for achieving business agility using Lean, Agile, and DevOps. (Scaled Agile, 2022).

Waterfall: is a sequential development process that flows like a waterfall through all phases of a project (analysis, design, development, and testing, for example), with each phase completely wrapping up before the next phase begins (Adobe, 2022).

Adkins, L. (2010). Coaching agile teams: A companion for Scrum masters, Agile Coaches, and project managers in transition. Addison-Wesley.