Presenting at the BCS Agile Lecture Series

The Web Development team was invited to present a case study at the BCS Agile Lecture Series in Bristol on 19 March 2013, which we gladly accepted.

After a rather noisy train journey in the quiet carriage with Jose Casal, our enthusiastic Agile consultant from Radtac, we arrived in Bristol to present a case study about the team’s journey to adopt Agile over the last two years. It was a great opportunity to reflect on how far we have come and to hear about how other organizations have fared.

Jose kicked off the evening by posing the question ‘Agile is simple to understand, but why can it be so difficult to adopt?’. He took us through some agile basics and spoke about the importance of taking your organization with you. For further information, please see his full talk.

There were two case studies on the agenda, one from The University of Kent Web Development team and one from Giovanni Asproni, a consultant and trainer from Asprotunity.

Our talk quickly took us from August 2010 to the present day and reminded us of how many things have changed along the way. We described how the beginning of the journey was not very pleasant – a significant project failure acted as a wake up call for the team, prompting us to make some big changes. However, we picked ourselves up and used this as an opportunity to take stock by identifying key strengths and weaknesses of the team and its processes. We found that though we had team members who were highly skilled and passionate about web development, we also had a number of problems. These ranged from a lack of defined processes for allocating and finishing work to problems with morale and attitudes towards our customers.

We knew that things needed to change significantly, so we created a vision for the team that everyone could get excited about. That vision was to become an excellent team that delivered great service to our customers and produced systems to be proud of.

An excellence plan grew out of this vision that included practical steps with achievable timeframes. This included creating a central funnel for work coming into the team, our first Kanban-style board for transparency and a skill building programme to ensure everyone had the necessary tools to do their jobs confidently.

We had seen agile processes working in the L&RD team and thought that we could use these techniques to improve our project delivery. We invited Jose in to give us a number of agile consultancy sessions which helped us to put processes in place that gradually helped us to transform our ways of working. We went through many iterations of changes before settling on a version of scrum that worked for us, and we are still evolving the process.

In 2011, all members of the team attended a 2 day Scrum Master (CSM) training course and became certified CSMs. They were then equipped with the tools they needed to develop systems in a whole new way. To support this new way of working, Mark created a SharePoint site for the product backlog, story cards and sprint planning. The whole team got on board and started having “Agile ceremonies”, which included morning standups, planning sessions, demos, retrospectives and working in iterations.

Though there is always more work to do, the team is much stronger than ever before, we are delivering successful projects and making happy customers. The agile principles have definitely helped us along the way and it was great to have the opportunity to share our experiences with the BCS group on 19th March 2013.