Read the Valpak case study presented in Chapter 19 of your textbook. This case study highlights the success of agile with a real-world example. Select one of the challenges presented in the case study (see Table 19.2)
Respond to each of the following:
· Identify the challenge you picked and briefly describe the actions Valpak took to overcome this challenge.
· How do these actions show an agile-based approach?
· If you encountered a similar challenge when developing a piece of software, what approach would you take?
· Discuss the need for an agile-based approach in the examples given. Could Valpak have used a waterfall approach to meet these challenges? Defend your answers.
· Reference
· Prehn, R. (2016, Jun 1).
As a team member, I want better user stories… Revelry. Retrieved from https://revelry.co/better-user-stories/.
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Chapter 19
Case Study—Valpak
Background
Established in 1968 and headquartered in Largo, Florida, Valpak is one of the leading direct marketing
companies in North America, owned and operated by Cox Target Media (CTM), a subsidiary of
Atlanta-based Cox Media Group (CMG). In addition, Valpak has one of the largest collections of
digital coupons on the Internet with thousands of local products and services, as well as national
brands.
Working in partnership with its network of nearly 170 franchisees in the United States and Canada,
Valpak helps more than 54,000 businesses a year to achieve their marketing goals. Valpak’s primary
competitors are Money Mailer, Valassis (Red Plum), and Super Coups. Valpak’s secondary
competition includes newspapers, television, Yellow Pages, and any other forms of advertising. All in
all, Valpak is trusted by consumers and merchants alike to consistently deliver value. The Blue
Envelope® delivers savings and value to nearly 40 million households each month. Annually, Valpak
will distribute some 20 billion offers inserted in more than 500 million envelopes. Valpak also offers
digital solutions with ®, an online site for printable coupons and coupon codes,www.Valpak.com
which has nearly 70 million offer views each month, as well as apps for smartphone platforms.
Valpak’s IT group builds and supports technology for a wide variety of stakeholders and audiences,
including consumers who are focused on saving money with coupons, Valpak franchises that need
systems to run their business and sales operations, merchants interested in tracking and maximizing
their returns on investment, and traditional internal corporate stakeholders that need to run the core
business operations. Efforts for these distinct audiences include:
To some companies, it may simply mean moving from a waterfall-style development process to
adopting a more agile development approach.
To others it may mean transforming the way the whole company operates. An example is America
Online (AOL). Years ago, AOL used to be a dial-up modem company, but as the Internet
technology changed, AOL recognized that it needed to transform the very nature of the company
to survive. It needed to shift from being an Internet service provider offering dial-up modem
access to a fast-paced provider of media content in order to shift its value proposition to continue
to attract subscribers. That required changing the way the whole company operated, in addition to
implementing a much more agile process to rapidly develop new media content. They used an
overall agile transformation driven top-down by their CEO to transform the whole company to
focus on delivering very-high-quality media content to the market quickly.1
Some companies may be far along the agile adoption curve, trying to move on to the next level;
and
Some may be just starting out.
We were able to successfully build a partnership with the government client in which we did a
very professional job of managing overall contractual requirements at the macro-level.
Within that , we were still able to implement a fairly agile developmentmacro-level envelope
approach at the micro-level.
Increasing the level of predictability and control requires beefing up the macro-level, providing
more detailed requirements at that level, and implementing at least a limited amount of change
control.
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http://www.Valpak.com
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To increase the level of agility, you can simply eliminate the macro-level altogether or limit it to
only very high-level requirements.
Other elements of the framework can be easily customized or eliminated depending on the scope
and complexity of the project and other factors.
The standard implementation uses a model very similar to Scrum for managing the development
effort, which uses a prioritized product backlog to drive the development process, and the work to
be done is broken up into iterations.
A more advanced implementation uses a lean approach, eliminates the iterations, and replaces them
with more of a pull approach that allows work items to be addressed whenever there is capacity to
work on them.
Valpak franchises: Order entry, office management, mobile/online sales tools, and CRM
applications are developed to support Valpak’s 170+ franchise locations located in the United
States and Canada. These franchises are independently owned and operated locations that utilize
Valpak’s franchise system to sell Valpak print and digital products to local merchants.
Consumers: Savings/coupon applications and websites are developed that provide daily value to
consumers looking to save money on their purchases. Consumers can interact with Valpak savings
, regardless of whether they are using Valpak’s traditional “print” mailer oranywhere at any time
one of Valpak’s several digital channels (web, mobile, SMS texting, e-mail). Valpak’s savings
content is also distributed to over 150 partner websites as well.
Merchants: Online websites and mobile applications are developed to allow merchants to manage
their advertising campaigns with Valpak.
Corporate: Traditional back-office operations, including manufacturing, marketing,
finance/accounting, order processing, and sales. The IT group develops and supports various ERP
and custom application solutions to automate these back-office operations.
Valpak’s ability to utilize technology to transform their business is a very significant factor in their
business success, and Valpak’s IT group is an integral part of the business transformation and growth
of the company. To compete with the quickly changing digital savings marketplace, Valpak
transitioned the entire IT organization to agile Scrum/Kanban processes with two-week sprint delivery
cycles. They embraced this change and quickly adapted. This effort was so well done in the IT
organization that Valpak is now driving the agile culture throughout the company, heading toward
“The Agile Enterprise.”
As director of agile leadership at Valpak, Stephanie Stewart has been responsible for leading the agile2
transformation. In this role, she is responsible for process facilitation, portfolio governance, program
management, project management, and of course, oversight of related people, processes and tools.
Stephanie leads the team of agile project leaders, who handle everything from project management to
Scrum mastering to leading Kanban teams. A self-admitted agile enthusiast, Stephanie has worked
passionately to encourage and support the IT organization at Valpak in fully embracing agile software
development, to move Valpak toward a greater vision of “The Agile Enterprise.”
Chris Cate, CIO, is the agile executive champion working with Stewart and the executive leadership
team in transforming the company over the past year. Cate also evangelizes “The Agile Enterprise”
vision by encouraging the adoption of agile values and the use of agile methods for non-IT
departments.
Bob Damato, director of software engineering, led the adoption of agile technical practices such as
test-driven development, continuous integration, and evolutionary architecture. Strong leadership for
technical practices across teams has been critical to maintaining and improving quality as part of the
agile transformation.
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1.
2.
3.
Overview
Valpak’s overall enterprise-level approach is based on the Scaled Agile Framework, which is shown3
in (see Chapter 15). The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) consists of three primary layers:Figure 15.1
Portfolio layer: The portfolio layer is the highest and most strategic layer in the Scaled Agile
Framework, where programs are aligned to the company’s business strategy and investment intent.
Program layer: The Scaled Agile Framework recognizes the need to align and integrate the efforts
of multiple teams that are engaged in large, complex enterprise-level development efforts to create
larger value to serve the needs of the enterprise and its stakeholders.
Team layer: The team layer forms the foundation of the Scaled Agile Framework and is where the
fundamental design, build, test activities are performed to fulfill the development requirements for
each major area of business. At Valpak, there are actually two different development processes
that are used in the team layer, as shown in . In most cases, Scrum is used for moreFigure 19.1
exploratory development, while a Kanban process is used for kinds ofrun the business
development.
Figure 19.1 Valpak agile process framework
Valpak implemented the SAFe from the bottom up:
In October 2011, Valpak started with six Scrum teams and three Kanban teams at the agile teams
(bottom) layer of the SAFe (Valpak currently has 10 Scrum teams and 3 Kanban teams).
Shortly after the agile teams were established, Valpak implemented road-mapping and release
management with the middle layer of the Scaled Agile Framework in mind.
Most recently, Valpak implemented the portfolio Kanban at the top layer of the Scaled Agile
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1.
2.
1.
2.
3.
Framework with their leadership team of executive sponsors.
Last but not least, Valpak added the architectural Kanban.
There are two key things that are most significant about this case study:
Valpak recognized the need to adapt the agile development process at the team level into an
overall enterprise model that is well integrated with their business. Valpak is one of the initial
pioneers in the use of the Scaled Agile Framework to provide that integration.
Valpak also recognized the need to use a Kanban process for efforts, instead ofrun the business
Scrum, which is used for exploratory development, because the needs are very different.
Both of these efforts show real thought leadership to fit a methodology (or combination of
methodologies) to the business and projects instead of force-fitting the business and projects to a
predefined, textbook approach.
Architectural Kanban
The is a recommended practice in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) that wasarchitectural Kanban
implemented by Valpak. It recognizes the need at an enterprise level to plan and implement consistent
and well-integrated architectures across all teams and projects.
This approach defined by the SAFe consists of defining architectural epics, which are “large
technology initiatives that are necessary to evolve portfolio solutions to support current and future
business needs.”4
According to Leffingwell, sources of architectural epics can include the following:
Mergers and acquisitions, which require technological integration
Technological change and infrastructure obsolescence
Performance and scalability challenges of existing solutions
Cost and economic drivers, such as avoiding duplication of effort
Leffingwell says these are “initiatives of epic proportions,” because they typically cut across three
dimensions:
Time: requiring multiple PSIs to implement, perhaps taking up to a year or two to complete
Scope: affecting multiple products, applications, and solutions
Organizations: affecting multiple teams, programs, business units, and even external entities”
5
At Valpak, architectural epics are captured in the architectural backlog, which is part of the
architectural Kanban system. They are processed through various states of maturity until they are
moved to implementation. According to Leffingwell, the following are the primary motivators for
using this architectural Kanban approach at Valpak:
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Make the Architectural Epic backlog and ongoing analysis visible to all.
Provide WIP limits to ensure the architects and teams analyze responsibly, and do not create
expectations for implementation or timeframes that far exceed capacity and reality.
Help drive collaboration amongst the key stakeholders in the business and Development
Teams.
Provide a quantitative, transparent basis for economic decision-making for these most
important technology decisions.6
Table 19.1 shows how the architectural Kanban board is organized at Valpak.
The “Value Stream Stage” indicates the stage of progress of each architectural Kanban epic
(“Development” often involves the Scrum and Kanban teams helping to implement the architectural
epic for their area of concern).
The “Swim Lane” rows in the Kanban chart indicate how the architectural epics are grouped by area
of focus.
Table 19.1 Architectural Kanban Board
Swim Lane Value Stream Stage
Queue Research Design Prototype Development Done
Scalability
Performance
Reliability
Technology Upgrades
Frameworks & Infrastructure
Innovation
The architectural Kanban board is made highly visible to all teams and provides work-in-progress
(WIP) limits on each of the stages in the Kanban process. Weekly standups are held with the architects
to review progress and discuss any issues.
Portfolio Kanban
The is a recommended practice in the Scaled Agile Framework that wasportfolio Kanban
implemented by Valpak. The purpose of the portfolio Kanban is to provide a way to plan, prioritize,
and manage a portfolio of business epics. “It brings visibility to upcoming work as well as work in
process, helps facilitate product development flow and can be a key factor in achieving enterprise—as
opposed to team or program—agility, and thereby more fully optimized business outcomes.
According to Leffingwell, the Kanban system is used in this context to accomplish several purposes:
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Make the strategic business initiative backlog (upcoming business epics) fully visible.
Bring structure to the analysis and decision making that moves these initiatives into
implementation, and make that process visible to all.
Provide WIP limits to ensure the teams responsible for analysis do so responsibly, and do not
create expectations for implementation or timeframes that far exceed capacity and reality.
Help drive collaboration amongst the key stakeholders in the business, Architecture and
Development Teams
Provide a quantitative, transparent basis for economic decision-making for these, the most
important business decisions.7
The implementation of the portfolio Kanban at Valpak included:
Highly visible (physical) Kanban board; however, no WIP limits were applied at the portfolio level
because it wasn’t found to be meaningful.
Portfolio Kanban standups held with executive sponsors weekly. Each executive sponsor addresses
any board movement of epics and any major decisions made.
Definition of an epic:
3 sprints of effort
3 agile teams to coordinate
Considerable corporate, franchise, or market value/impact
The portfolio Kanban is reset at the beginning of each new quarter based on the output from an
executive quarterly planning meeting called the Portfolio Review Board (PRB) and based on
retrospective improvements identified. PRB focuses on planning only; status and day-to-day
collaboration is left to the portfolio Kanban process.
Value stream (includes entrance/exit criteria) on portfolio Kanban includes funnel, vet, design,
, and is usually when the epic is being developed by the Scrum orbuild, deliver done. Build
Kanban teams.
The is divided into “current quarter,” “next quarter,” and “unplanned,” so that everyonefunnel
knows what epics have been planned for and what epics have come up that were not in the last
quarterly plan. Epics not in the quarterly plan are subject to dot voting.
Challenges with the portfolio Kanban have been:
Standup derailment risk: There is too much talk about strategy or decision making or solutioning
during the standup. The director of agile leadership facilitates them; without that facilitation, they tend
to fall apart.
: Executive schedules are always busy, so not every executive sponsor shows upExecutive schedules
every week. Valpak tries not to cancel portfolio Kanbans if two or more executive sponsors are
available.
: There was initially some confusion over what an epic was and if it deserved toDefinition of an epic
be on the board (versus a strategy or a feature or a story). Valpak recently settled on a definition of an
epic for this purpose.
: A list of all active business strategies has been established to tie to the epicsTying strategies to epics
on the portfolio Kanban. The goal is that strategies spawn one or more epics, and epics are managed
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2.
3.
4.
via the portfolio Kanban process.
Project Management Approach
Valpak has implemented the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) very closely. The SAFe does not
recognize the concept of a “project”; however, Valpak does have a handful of projects wrapped around
large cross-team efforts. For those projects, Valpak assigns an agile project leader to work with the
relevant Scrum Masters, product owners, and stakeholders to pull it all together, but there are only
about a handful of these projects running at any given time. Most work (even work that crosses
multiple teams) can be managed by collaboration among the product owners and Scrum Masters for
the agile teams.
At Valpak, projects are represented by epics, and each epic has an executive sponsor. Epics are
managed via the portfolio Kanban process (described earlier). The portfolio is planned and prioritized
quarterly using these epics. In most cases, epics require the work of three or more Scrum / Kanban
teams to accomplish and therefore have more than one product owner involved.
Some epics also have important business tasks to be managed as well (not just a technology effort).
For this kind of large epic, Valpak assigns an agile project leader as a project manager to coordinate
the work of the business and the agile teams. A waterfall type of schedule may be applied to a project
(which is typically the case when you have to fold in the business tasks); however, it is still an agile
project management approach overall.
Where project management is needed for large cross-team efforts, the agile project leader will create a
project plan (schedule) or a roadmap to represent all the teams, sprints, and business tasks involved
with the effort as well as significant milestones. Even though project management may be applied, the
agile values are still top of mind for the agile project leaders. This might mean a light roadmap versus
a lengthy project plan; in other words, the agile project leaders plan and document to the needs of the
project at hand. They apply the degree of project management that produces the most value and expect
that the plan is certain to change.
Valpak uses four levels of planning:
Daily: Scrum team standups in front of task boards
Biweekly: Scrum sprint planning (all teams run on a common sprint schedule with sprint planning
on a Monday and the sprint reviews on a Friday, two weeks later)
Monthly: Release planning across Scrum teams (product owner-level planning with a six-month
look-ahead)
Quarterly: Quarterly plan of epics (executive sponsor-level planning that fuels the portfolio
Kanban for the upcoming quarter)
Valpak has learned to fit the project management methodology to the type of project:
Scrum is used for most exploratory development and currently consists of 10 teams aligned with
each of Valpak’s major areas of business focus.
Kanban is used for run-the-business type of work and/or areas that are not conducive to or don’t
require the highly prescriptive nature of Scrum.
Infrastructure projects and large-scale corporate projects are managed as waterfall with some of
the Scrums and Kanbans producing work that supports those projects.
According to Stewart:
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There is no one-size-fits-all methodology; at least not that I know of… Project Managers need to
be more versatile and flexible than ever before. PMs need to be able to effectively pivot between
command-and-control and servant leadership focused facilitators. Even though I love working
with agile teams right now, I also know your run of the mill Traditional project when I see it. I’ve
learned to pivot between the two by applying different soft skills. Traditional is all about
directing and managing whereas agile is all about serving and facilitating.8
Tools, communication, and reporting
The following is a summary of Valpak’s approach for tools, communication, and reporting:
All Valpak agile teams maintain physical boards in a common area. Scrum teams use a task board
format to display their stories and tasks and show their progress each day. Kanban teams have
boards with their custom value stream, and sometimes swim lanes for further classification of
work. Additionally, Valpak uses Pivotal Tracker for Scrum teams to manage its backlogs and
sprints.
To assist with managing cross-team dependencies, each product owner tags stories (in Pivotal
Tracker) with noted dependencies on other teams. A report is distributed each week that shows
these dependencies so that product owners and teams can coordinate and collaborate accordingly.
On the day after sprint planning Monday, two reports are distributed:
Sprint accomplishments (from previous sprint) and
Sprint goals (for current sprint)
On sprint review day, an e-mail of sound bites of accomplishments for all Scrum and Kanban
teams is sent to a broad group of stakeholders.
After the product owners perform their monthly release planning process at the feature level, a
one-page view is distributed with six-month look-ahead.
After the Valpak executives meet for their quarterly planning of epics, a one-page view is
distributed with a four-quarter look-ahead.
After the last grooming session of the sprint, each Scrum Master sends out a quick list of proposed
stories, anticipated to be planned into the next sprint. These are highly subject to change but help
product owners and stakeholders to see what’s coming to better coordinate and collaborate across
teams.
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Challenges
Cultural and organizational challenges
Table 19.2 is a summary of the key cultural and organizational challenges faced by Valpak and how
they were handled.
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Table 19.2 Solutions to Cultural and Organizational Challenges
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Challenge Solution
Managing Cross-Team Dependencies
Valpak has very highly integrated systems. In establishing
the agile teams, it was almost impossible to create teams
that could operate independently of any other teams. In
most cases, teams are dependent on one another for a
given feature or epic. The most common dependency at
Valpak is between Valpak’s BI Scrum teams and all other
teams, since just about everything involves the ability to
track and report.
Besides continuous cross-team
collaboration and communication,
Valpak has implemented:
Cross-team dependencies report
distributed each week based on
dependencies tagged in Pivotal
Tracker
Proposed stories distributed week
prior to new sprint
A meeting referred to as the “Scrum
Powwow” held each week with
product owners and Scrum Masters
to discuss current sprint, next sprint,
and roadmap dependencies
Visibly flagging dependencies
between teams on task boards
Shared acceptance criteria prior to or
early in sprint
Better planning and coordination of
handoffs between teams
Allocation of time prior to the sprint
for proper discovery and architecture
across impacted teams for
large/complex cross-team epics
Cross-team post-planning standup
with the impacted teams the day after
sprint planning to sync up
stories/tasks and collaborate early
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Accountability at the Top
Since SAFe was implemented bottom up, the agile teams
were in place well before the portfolio Kanban. Prior to the
portfolio Kanban process, there were major disconnects
between the executives and the product owners. Mixed
directives and conflicting direction was coming from the
top, leaving product owners and, therefore, teams with
roadmap whiplash.
Executive sponsors named for each
Scrum team to establish
accountability and ownership at the
top
Product owners meet regularly with
executive sponsors on their
upcoming sprint plans and roadmaps
Portfolio Kanban established
Quarterly planning of epics
Weekly executive-level standups in
front of portfolio Kanban board
Executive sponsors frequent the
sprint reviews
Retrospectives held with executive
sponsors to look for improvements
Product Owner Collaboration
Collaboration can be just as difficult for product owners as
it is for the teams. At first, product owners were very
comfortable working within their own teams. However,
where there were dependencies with other teams, there
were often collaboration issues between product owners.
At first, a Scrum-of-Scrums meeting
was held for 15 minutes each week in
the task board common area with
product owners and Scrum Masters
to review dependencies and their
progress.
The Scrum-of-Scrums format
becomes difficult beyond five teams,
so Valpak evolved to the “Scrum
Powwow” format. The Scrum
Powwow is a one-hour meeting held
each week with product owners,
Scrum Masters, architects, and other
IT leaders to collaborate on
dependencies for current sprint, next
sprint, and roadmap across teams.
Product owners look for proposed
stories distributed each week for
dependent teams; product owners
have access to one another’s backlogs
in Pivotal Tracker.
A cross-team dependencies report is
distributed each week that helps
product owners to manage
dependencies with other teams.
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Franchise-Based Company
Valpak is a franchise-based organization. This means that
while products and features may be released more quickly
under an agile framework, they aren’t necessarily adopted,
utilized, or sold any quicker by the franchises. Rolling out
new products and features to Valpak’s franchise
organization takes considerable planning and support.
Valpak’s sales and marketing
organizations are becoming more and
more agile to quickly enable
franchises with new products and
features.
Training and communication are
happening more quickly and
frequently than ever before to keep
up with the agile releases. There will
always be those franchises that are
slow to adopt new products, new
tools, and new features; however,
Valpak is pushing as hard and fast as
possible to roll out new products and
features. If the product or feature
proves to be valuable, most
franchises will get on board.
Managing Stakeholders
At Valpak, stakeholders are anyone who isn’t the team, the
product owner, the Scrum Master, or the executive
sponsor. This means that stakeholders are at all levels of
the organization and all departments across the business.
Stakeholders also include Valpak’s franchises and
consumers; however, those particular stakeholders are
represented indirectly by Valpak’s sales and marketing
organizations, respectively. Product owners had difficulty
in managing the various, diverse stakeholders. Each
product owner had dozens of stakeholders to deal with,
each with their own needs.
All stakeholders were given one-hour
training on agile, Scrum, and
Kanban.
Over time, product owners refined
their approach to stakeholder
management. Each product owner
has a slightly unique approach based
on the needs of their stakeholders.
Some product owners began regular
stakeholder meetings with core
groups to elicit their needs and keep
them apprised of progress.
Some product owners require that
their stakeholders submit a project
request form (PRF) to articulate their
stories in proper format.
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Agile Culture Shift
An organization’s culture can’t be changed overnight with
a simple announcement like “going agile!” In fact, it can’t
be changed with just a kick-off and some training, either.
Starting out with agile back in October 2011, Valpak had
about 30% naysayers, 40% indifferent, and 30%
enthusiasts.
The culture that is must beagile
constantly developed and nurtured
over time with every meeting,
decision, action, and event that takes
place across the organization.
To help implement this culture shift
at Valpak, an agile coach was
involved (three to four days a week
on site) for about eight months.
To continue the culture shift, Valpak
has agile excellence meetings with
product owners, Scrum Masters, and
IT leadership every other month to
perform a retrospective of agile (a
retrospective of retrospectives, if you
will).
In addition, what was the old PMO
was restructured to the agile
leadership office, led by the agile
leadership director supporting a team
of agile project leaders.
To continue the culture shift
momentum in fun and memorable
ways, Valpak holds events with the
agile teams and stakeholders like
Xbox Kinect Fruit Ninja
Tournaments. Most recently, Valpak
held an Agile Roast for the first
anniversary of agile at Valpak.
Developing High-Performance Teams
With any agile transformation, teams start off by “doing
agile”; following the basic mechanics without necessarily
understanding or embracing the values. Such was the case
at Valpak. All teams were trained and knew just enough to
be dangerous.
Moving the teams from the basic
mechanics of agile to truly
high-performing teams; no longer “doing
agile” but “being agile.” Valpak has
recognized that developing
self-organizing, high-performance teams
doesn’t happen automatically and
requires leadership and continued
support.
“Agile is not about getting out of the
way of your teams but rather staying
involved as servant leaders.”9
Technical challenges
Table 19.3 is a summary of the technical challenges faced by Valpak and how they were handled:
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Table 19.3 Technical Challenges and Solutions at Valpak
Challenge Solution
Lack of Continuous Integration (CI)
No organization or structure around automated testing.
No automated execution of tests.
Valpak implemented continuous
integration where code is committed
throughout the day with tests
automatically run and errors sent to all
developers to resolve.
Build Process
Lack of structure and organization around build
process. Build process was completely brute force and
highly manual.
Valpak’s build process is now
semi-automated and progressing toward
fully automated with twice-daily builds to
development and test environments.
Legacy Code Base
At the beginning of agile, Valpak had a legacy code
base consisting of over a half million lines of untested,
unclean code.
Valpak implemented Test-Driven
Development (TDD) methodology, along
with clean code practices. Percentage of test
coverage continues to increase with
continuous support of TDD and clean code
practices.
Architecture Role/Involvement
Early on, the architecture role was not well defined. In
addition, as a leftover from the waterfall days, teams
did not feel empowered to make architecture
decisions.
Architectural Kanban
Architect and lead developer roles better
defined
Improved collaboration between
architecture and teams
Manual Tests / Quality / Risk
No real automated tests existed, which increased the
risk of quality issues as Valpak moved faster in
delivering working software to the business. Releases
required what Valpak calls “production checks” to
ensure that everything was deployed correctly.
Valpak is currently in the infancy stages of
QA automation using Selenium. Teams have
begun to automate tests by including
technical stories in each sprint.
Other challenges
Table 19.4 is a summary of some other challenges faced by Valpak and how they were handled.
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Table 19.4 Additional Challenges and Solutions at Valpak
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Challenge Solution
Planning Sprints for Sustainable Pace
Out the gate, no team had proper velocity
measures. At first, teams planned too
much into their sprints and ended up
exhausted in trying to accomplish their
sprint goals.
Over time, the agile leadership office worked with
teams to establish some best practices for keeping
within their sustainable pace.
Most teams have a pencils-down day built into their
ground rules in which no new development can be
completed toward the current sprint. Stories may be
dropped as a result, but sustainable pace is preserved.
All teams use a custom capacity calculator
(spreadsheet) that was created to take into account
non–sprint work like meetings, administrivia, and
support in order to better estimate sprint capacity for
each team member.
So as not to overcommit to a sprint, most teams use
the concept of extra-credit stories. Extra-credit stories
are established during sprint planning by the product
owner as a stretch goal of sorts; if time and capacity
allow, the team will complete them.
Decomposing Stories
Teams are often challenged to decompose
stories to fit within a single sprint and
without breaking them down by task
(develop, test, etc.).
Proper story decomposition can be more art than science.
Through training and continuous coaching from Scrum
Masters, product owners and teams learned to decompose
stories better with each sprint.
Story Points
Early into Valpak’s agile transformation
some teams still struggled with the proper
use of story points. Many teams were
applying story points as a measure of
complexity rather than effort. In addition,
some teams were applying hours to tasks
and skipping the story point step
altogether, which basically negates the
benefit of this relative estimating
technique.
Through training and continuous coaching from Scrum
Masters, teams learned to think of story points as effort.
Story points are a relative measure of effort to be done,
not complexity, not priority, not sequence. Also, the point
of improving Valpak’s story point estimating is to
someday stop having to think about hours.
Team Collaboration Spaces
At Valpak, the software development
organization has the advantage of being
collocated in the same building.
However, as a leftover from Valpak’s
waterfall days, team members were
scattered about, which meant there were
no team collaboration spaces.
Just a few months after Valpak’s first sprint, a massive
office cube move was organized across 70+ employees
to bring together team members with their teams into
cube quad areas.
Within the cube quads, the inner walls of the cubes
were taken down to create a “bullpen” for each team.
To top it off, creative signs were created for each team
and hung over their cube areas.
With open spaces for each team, collaboration and
osmotic communication increased dramatically.
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Non-agile Tools
Prior to agile, Valpak used a
traditional project management tool
called @task. So, Valpak’s agile
process inherited a non-agile tool.
This meant that sprint planning and
backlog management were tedious
and time-consuming exercises for
each team.
After an evaluation of several agile tools, Pivotal
Tracker was selected. Pivotal Tracker was considered
just enough tool for Valpak’s purpose, remembering
the Agile Manifesto value of “Individuals and
interactions over processes and tools.”
Pivotal Tracker did not replace the need for physical
task boards, which provide high visibility to the
process that a tool can’t match.
Predicting Release Dates
In some segments of the agile
community, it is not considered very
agile to predict a release date and be held
responsible for meeting that schedule.
Because of the nature of the Valpak
business, it was essential to be able to
predict release dates with some level of
accuracy.
Valpak adopted a strategy to predict release dates.
“…by nature of time-boxing, the schedule is a fixed
constraint. With the schedule being a fixed constraint (as
is cost based on team size), it is scope that remains
flexible. So, the scope that is included in any given release
is flexible based on what the team was able to accomplish,
what stories get dropped, what natural disaster impeded
the team, who was out sick, and so on and so forth.
Whether that scope accomplished is acceptable for release
to production is always a product owner decision.”10
Developing Agile Project Leaders
Valpak recognized the need to define a
new leadership role and job description
for its project leaders so that someone in
this position can assume the role of
Scrum Master, Kanban leader, and/or
project manager, depending on the work
at hand.
Valpak created a new job description for an agile project
oriented around leadership of technology-focusedleader
projects and teams relying on agile values and principles.
“The focus of this position is on delivering value over
meeting constraints, leading the team over managing
tasks, and adapting to change over conforming to plans.”
11
Key Success Factors
Four factors helped make agile a success at Valpak.
Top-down support coupled with bottom-up drive
Taking the agile transformation seriously and supporting it at all levels of the business was essential to
make the culture shift to the agile mind-set. Stewart explains:
Rather than continue to dabble with Agile, we went full-fledged, full-bore Agile (all software
development teams all at once). Once our CIO declared that we were going Agile there was no
looking back. He gained the support of our executive leadership team and they helped us to sell it
to our stakeholders, including our franchise network. At first, there were some hold outs (the
resistance) but with each and every sprint we have managed to convert a few more into believers.
Whenever someone says, “Agile is not working for us,” I like to respond with “No, we are not
working for Agile.”12
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Hiring an independent coach
Attempting to DIY (do-it-yourself) agile can sometimes backfire. You need to spend the money on
bringing on an agile coach for about six months to train the teams and support the process. Companies
often tend to appreciate the advice of an independent expert more than a trusted member of the
company’s own staff.
Continued support each and every day
Where agile has failed with other companies, it seems that it was done with a big one-time kick-off
without continued support. Stewart continues:
I think I read once that a culture change takes 10 years, so… We continue to support agile
each and every day. That’s my primary role as director of agile leadership, but I am well
supported by it directors, product owners, agile project leaders, and even team members that
have become great evangelists in their own right. The more you talk about it, the more they
talk about it. Ways in which we continue to support agile here are things like:
Agile Excellence meetings every other month (the retro of all retros, so to speak)
Scrum Powwow each week (cross-team current sprint, future sprint, and roadmap
discussions)
Team Building (with Xbox Kinect Tournaments for agile teams to compete against one
another)
Celebrations (we did an Agile Roast for our first anniversary this month, and we have cake a
lot for important sprint/release milestones)
Agile tours given to special groups of stakeholders or VIPs on request
Facility sponsor for Tampa Bay agile meet-ups, along with helping to secure speakers and
topics
Agile Manifesto and other agile-related posters highly visible throughout the IT work space13
Stewart said, “It’s fun to hear people dropping the (that is, mentioning Agile) atA bomb
large-scale events like our annual Coupon U with our franchises or corporate all-hands meetings.
Agile is really a rock star around here!”14
Senior management engagement/business ownership
Getting Valpak’s senior management engaged and committed to the effort was a significant factor in
the success of the effort. Chris Cate describes the process:
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Valpak has fundamentally changed the way we get work done. This is not just a new process that
only involves technology teams but more of a mind-set across all groups that puts an emphasis on
driving real business value to our customers in short iterative cycles.
Business is deeply engaged with their products and services that they are asking IT to build.
Business (Exec Sponsor and Product Owner) control the backlog and work output—they own
it!
They now have complete ownership and accountability—no place to hide.
They are actively engaged in managing priority discussions with their customers to identify
the highest valuable feature that the team should work on.
The business is getting more work done across all teams.
None of our business owners would ever go back to the older Waterfall process.15
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1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Results and Conclusions
More strategic management focus. The agile development process, using empowered,
self-organizing teams, has enabled a major shift in the Valpak management approach. Cate
explains it this way:
Conversations are fundamentally changing at the Sr. executive team level, focusing less on
tactical implementation issues and more on strategic growth initiatives:
Do these things less
No longer have to justify and/or explain extremely large project plans (the Executive
Sponsor and Product Owner decide the sprint schedules and backlog priorities and own it)
No longer have to talk about why IT missed a date or did not set expectations correctly
between project team and Executive Sponsor (ES and PO own the priorities and
expectations)
Rarely have to play the ‘peacemaker’ role between various groups now that the business
firmly owns the work product
Started doing more of
Strategic planning and execution to grow the business
More involved in business development, partnership, and acquisition executions
Partnering with other Sr. team members to help them think through growing their business
lines versus fixing IT16
Management of IT resources. The shift to more empowered, self-organizing teams has also made
the management of IT resources much easier. Cate says:
Less time needed to manage personnel issues since the process helps to correct this
naturally
Teams are empowered to solve their own problems through collaboration, thus reducing
functional manager activities
Much more open and transparent environment where the employees, or contractors, not
fully contributing are identified and coached up or out quicker17
Time-to-market. Valpak releases software to production at the end of every sprint. Time-to-market
was significantly improved as a result of shorter iterations. With two-week sprint cycles,
new/enhanced software was available more quickly than ever before to stakeholders, including
internal, franchises, merchants, and consumers.
Alignment and collaboration. Alignment and collaboration between business and IT were
increased as a result of a highly visible process. Product owners became truly accountable for their
products and teams, and the “us versus them” mentality quickly disappeared.
Employee productivity and morale. Productivity and morale among the teams improved as a result
of the empowered and self-organizing team’s principle of agile. In fact, team morale and pride are
greater than they’ve ever been at Valpak.
Delivering more frequent value to customers. A value-driven process is now in place. Decisions
are made on what to work on based on value—that value is derived from stakeholder input. With
two-week sprint cycles, teams deliver the highest value stories each sprint. Value is being
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6.
7.
8.
9.
delivered to stakeholders more frequently than ever before.
Openness . Teams, at the portfolio and architecture levels use highly visible taskand transparency
boards to track progress—anyone on the team or in the company can easily see a visual status of
what stage of work each story / task is in at any time. In addition, teams know what they’re going
to be working on for the next two weeks, and all the teams have visibility into what the other
teams are doing.
Responsiveness and adaptivity. Changes can be implemented more quickly than ever before. It is
easier to change strategy and pivot. This makes experimentation and risk taking much more
feasible. Being able to try out new ideas and turn on a dime is critical, not only for startups but also
for larger companies that do not want to become obsolete.
Software quality. There is increased emphasis on Test-Driven Development (TDD), unit testing,
and clean code. Continuous integration allows recognizing the impact of a change quickly.
Lessons Learned
Forming projects around teams
Prior to Valpak’s agile transformation, when a project was initiated, a team would be formed around
the project. In most cases, the team members were already assigned to other projects. Stewart says:
So, with project plans changing as they do, a team member would typically end up being pulled
in multiple directions, reporting to multiple masters, across many projects all at the same time.
From a people perspective, this is not a fun place to be (remember, “multitasking” is the new
four-letter word). The result was low morale from all the project whiplash going on.18
With the new agile approach, Valpak shifted to “forming projects around teams.” There are 10 Scrums
and three Kanbans. Stewart says:
We have naturally experienced a shift in our project initiation process. Now, when a project is
requested, we evaluate the request based on the existing Scrum and Kanban teams, and we form
. Sometimes this means breaking up the project to fit the visionthe project around the teams
and/or skill of the teams. So, as opposed to forming a team around a project, we are now forming
a project around teams.19
Planning team capacity and developing a sustainable pace
Valpak’s Scrum Masters needed a better approach to refine team capacity calculations during sprint
planning and to allow for non–sprint activities (such as product support) that might require some of the
team’s time during a sprint. Valpak developed and implemented a team capacity calculator
(spreadsheet) for this purpose, which factored in the amount of time each team member was actually
available to work on sprint activities. Stewart describes the process:
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315
During the planning session, we mitigate this risk by having team members predict their personal
sprint capacity (50%, 80%, etc.), taking into account non-sprint meetings and a predictive
measure of support. Also, we can further manage this by only working on support that our
Product Owner deems immediate work. Any other support can be backlogged and planned into a
future sprint. Now, should all hell break loose in the support arena, some stories may be dropped
or some stories might not meet the team’s definition of done.20
Using sprint reviews and “science fairs”
There was a lot of difficulty associated with scaling sprint reviews to an enterprise level with multiple
teams needing to hold sprint reviews with some of the same stakeholders concurrently.
Our first take at Sprint Reviews was pure madness! Each ScrumMaster would schedule a separate
1- to 2-hour meeting on the same Friday for each Scrum team. That’s nine 1- to 2-hour meetings
within an 8-hour business day [—] and on a Friday no less!21
Valpak developed a common sprint review process accompanied by a “science fair” approach.
Reviews [were] shortened to 90 minutes, with each team presenting for just 10 minutes each.
Within those 10 minutes, the Scrum Master provides a condensed version of the Sprint
accomplishments and metrics, and the team demonstrates only the stuff… Following thatsexy
90-minute period, we hold a one hour Science Fair in the cube areas where the teams sit. Just like
parents viewing student experiments at a school Science Fair, this hour is for stakeholders…to
make the rounds at their own pace to each team they have an interest in for any given sprint.22
1 Jochen (Joe) Krebs, Presentation to the Agile Boston Group, February 2010.
2 .http://www.linkedin.com/pub/stephanie-stewart/31/317/a01
3 .http://scaledagileframework.com/
4 Dean Leffingwell, “Architectural Epic Abstract,” http://scaledagileframework.com/architectural-epic
./
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Stephanie Stewart, comments from “Podcast This Week”
9 Ibid.
10 Blog, “Release Dates in Agile Not Taboo,” posted by Stephanie Stewart, June 25, 2012, http:/
./iamagile.com/2012/06/25/release-dates-in-agile-not-taboo-4/
11 Jim Highsmith, (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2010).Agile Project Management
12 Stephanie Stewart, personal e-mail correspondence.
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http://www.linkedin.com/pub/stephanie-stewart/31/317/a01
http://scaledagileframework.com/architectural-epic/
http://scaledagileframework.com/architectural-epic/
316
13 Stewart, personal e-mail.
14 Ibid.
15 Chris Cate, Cox Target Media CIO, personal e-mail correspondence, November 12, 2012.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Blog, “An Agile Light Bulb Moment: Forming Projects Around Teams,” posted by Stephanie
Stewart, April 20, 2012, http://iamagile.com/2012/04/20/an-agile-light-bulb-moment-forming
.-projects-around-teams/
19 Ibid.
20 Blog, “Accountability to Sustainable Pace and Work/Life Balance,” posted by Stephanie Stewart,
April 10, 2012, http://iamagile.com/2012/04/10/accountability-to-sustainable-pace-and-worklife
.-balance/
21 Blog, “Our Evolution of Sprint Reviews,” posted by Stephanie Stewart, June 13, 2012, http:/
./iamagile.com/2012/06/13/our-evolution-of-sprint-reviews/
22 Ibid.
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