How Agile works depends on the organisation. At times I’ve thought “Oh well, we were doing things wrong” but other times I’ve said “Well, we were doing things in a way that just isn’t right now.” It was right for the organisation then but it wasn’t right for the organisation now. We’ve evolved into a different organisation from the one that we were and therefore the way that we apply XP is different.
As we grew there was this general feeling of things not being quite right. We had a partial model because we kicked off an internal project to replace our deployment platform and we decided that since we were the customers the right thing to do was to set up an internal project board to oversee that.
As a group that involved people across the organisation and was meeting on a regular basis. It set a potential model for future projects for the working groups we set up. It was obvious that we had grown fast and we were having a lot of problems. We were doing things our own way and not really getting in touch with what the community was doing. I’d certainly started to have feelings that perhaps we were not doing things right.
Following that, and some of the discussions around that, we kicked off a working group, a think tank to look at what some of the problems were in the organisation.
The think tank was basically made of people from the development team, we had to try and concentrate on things from the development team point of view. We got some of the [biz] team to come and talk to us from time to time, but we needed to be able to take ownership of it. We identified all sorts of key areas and the steps one might take to get to those areas. As a result of this a number of working groups then spun out. Interestingly, they’re special interests groups of developers.
A lot of things operate on the three week iteration. Typically what that’ll mean is that the group meets once each iteration and then participants in the group are expected to spend about a couple of hours between each meeting doing some homework before the next one. Most of the working groups have been set up with the idea of having an end in sight, or they’ve effectively become project or management boards.
So for instance one of the key areas was that we identified was that we have a real problem with estimation. On the whole we have to do fixed price contracts, as we work predominately in the public sector. So we have to find ways that make fixed price contracts work for us. One of the things that’s key to that is that we need to be fairly good at estimating things, and so we have an estimation working group, and it’s a about development and is involved in the whole bidding process.
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