Speaker: Suren Samarchyan
Talk: “Опыт внедрения enterprise level agile”

Suren Samarchyan
Russia

Suren is Head of project management department at Innova Systems. He has Ph.D. degree in pure mathematics and he is passionate about fundamental science. First time he experienced Extreme Programming at Monterey Design Systems (now part of Synopsys Inc) as a software developer in 2001. Few years later he discovered that Personal Software Process by Carnegie Mellon SEI nicely applies fundamental science approaches to software development and became PSP coach. Since that time he has been helping teams to practice different methodologies best fitting their concrete cases. Currently Suren’s interests are focused on enterprise level agile/lean adoptions.

Talk:

“Опыт внедрения enterprise level agile”
“Enterprise level agile adoption case study”

Nowadays many development teams face problems that can be solved with agile approach making them much more effective. No doubt, every agile adoption is unique. Every time we face new socio-psychological and technological problems that doesn’t allow us to use standard methods. Anyway, agile transition for development teams is well-tried during about fifteen years in thousands of organizations and we may assume that it is more or less studied.

After implementing agile for development teams we often face new, even tougher, impediments. The point is that development teams do not live on an island. They are the part of larger organization and they need to collaborate with different teams that use another, often conflicting, approach. One way to deal with it is doing workaround i.e. creating some special interfaces (or better to say pillows) between these approaches that mitigate the problems. Some companies decided to go further adopting agile at the enterprise level. Enterprise level agile transition is usually risky, stressful and requires will-power to go on despite many obstacles and failures. So pros and cons should be well thought before making such decision.

At Innova Systems we have chosen another way. A year ago we started enterprise wide agile/lean transition without waiting for development teams to adopt it. Some very hard deadlines made transition even tougher. We have started doing agile at all levels, for the most critical projects, all at once. Looking back we study what worked well, what didn’t work and what course corrections we have made on the way.