Have you ever questioned yourself, on how Agile your “SAP Organization” is? Possibly not since the words “SAP Implementation project” are still synonymous with the Waterfall model. To the credit of both SAP and many companies using SAP, great strides have been made in the direction of Agile.
Here are a few questions you may ask, concerning your organization:
“Are you operating in Agile-Fall?”
One of my scrum masters executing a large-scale implementation project in Agile mode chuckled during a retrospective meeting. He said, “Naveen, we are doing this project in Agile-Fall”.
Intrigued by his note, I asked him to elaborate on his comment. His explanation sounded very logical; The Design and Build part of the project is executed in Agile mode. However, the documentation, testing, change management, basis, and security activities were still Waterfall. Hence the combination of two aspects led to the word “Agile-Fall”.
“How comfortable is your team with challenging the status quo”?
The purpose of sprint planning in the Agile world is to discuss, debate, and negotiate on the story points, prioritization, and acceptance criteria. However, sometimes a team gets into a relaxed mode of planning. This mode is where they accept the stories brought into the backlog with or without proper acceptance criteria. Have you seen that occur in your team? As leaders try out this quick litmus test – Go around your Agile teams and ask them how many times the team rejected a story brought by the product owners into the backlog. You may find the answers surprising.
“How do you nominate a Product Owner?”
For most SAP practitioners the word “Product Owner” is still a new buzzword. Organizations (some, not all) are still trying to map this role into either Manager or Solution Architect career paths. The reality of being a Product Owner doesn’t have to be evolving from one of the two branches. He could be an end-user who is uber-passionate about the product and dwells in a world to enhance the experience of the product. Do quick profiling of your product owners in the company and share the results in the comments section.
Come to my Free Webinar on this Topic on Wednesday
What’s your methodology to scale in Agile? Did you figure out, that as granular as one can break down a feature into User stories with 1 story point, one can also scale an Agile program with multiple workstreams to realize a traditional SAP project? Do the terms scalable Agile framework, increment planning, or Scrum of Scrums sound familiar or interest you? Do you want to know the best practices on how you can utilize Agile methodologies to effectively run your large-scale S/4 and User Experience projects? If this topic intrigues you tune in to my upcoming webinar on “SAFe” as an Operational Approach to the User Experience Journey in S/4” Details and registration HERE
