Scrum in a LargeOrganizationRalph Koglin CPO, Bernd Götz CSM

Introduction

•Today•History•Good and Bad from the Trenches•What's next?

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• Bernd and Ralph

About Us

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• Bernd and Ralph

About Us

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Swiss Re is a leading and highly diversified globalre/insurance company

• Our financial strength is currently rated:Standard & Poor’s: AA-/stable; Moody’s A1/positive;A.M. Best: A+/stable

• A pioneer in insurance-based capital market solutions, wecombine financial strength and unparalleled expertise forthe benefit of our clients.

• We deliver both traditional and innovative offeringsin Property & Casualty and Life & Health that meet ourclients' needs.

• 150 years of experience in providing wholesalere/insurance and risk management solutions.

The “Gherkin”, London

Headquarters, Zurich

Armonk, New York

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• Develop a global treaty rating platform reflecting the best practices ofexisting rating methods and tools currently implemented in the Americas,Europe, and Asia-Pacific as well as more recent and future developments

• Replace a wealth of existing tools (largely excel based tools)

• The Global Rating Platform forms a central part of the underwriting process

• A multi-year initiative

The Global Rating Plattform

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GRP Today

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• Chief Product Owner, three Product Owners

• 37 team members

– Four teams with Scrum Masters

– One "Chief Scrum Master"

• Distributed between

– Riga (Latvia)

– Zurich (Switzerland)

The Project Setup

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Teams and Chapters

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See Kniberg, Scaling Agile @ Spotify

• 3 week Sprints

• Working Agreements

– Definition of Ready

– Definition of Done

• Daily Stand ups

– 10 -15 minutes per team

– 10 -15 minutes Scrum of Scrum

• Product Backlogs

• Regular planning poker sessions for storypoint estimation and release planning

Scrum Setup

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Sprint Details

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Sprint 81 Sprint 82

Monday

Sprint releasedeployment, BusinessReview preparation

Business ReviewRetrospectives (per team)

Sprint Planning (all)Story planning andestimation per team

Story planning andestimation per team

Mor

ning

Aft

erno

on

SprintingFriday Tuesday

Story preview sessions

Story analysis and designSprint release wrap up(continued on Friday)

Thursday

Release Planning

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1 2 3 S 2 3 4 5 S1 S

Release 5.1 – May 12

3 Feature Sprints1 Stabilisation Sprint

Major Topic:• xxx

(incl. performance improvements)

Minor Topics:• yyy

ca. 6 small Stories:- agreed critical stories

Major Topic:• xxx

(development proceeds till end of 2014)

Minor Topics:• yyy• zzz (agreed on stories)

ca. 10 small Stories:- agreed critical stories

Stabilisationonly!

Release 5.2 – Sept 15

5 Feature Sprints1 Stabilisation Sprint

Release 5.3 – Oct 27

2 StabilisationSprints

S

History

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• ~10 team members

• In 2008 the project started with"Swiss Re RUP"

• Large use case documents

– expensive to maintain

– handed over from Business to IT(throw it over the fence….)

• Wasteful!

2008: Business vs IT

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Use CaseDocument

modernanalyst.com

• ~ 15 team members, all in one team

• Crisis workshop to pull the project together

• "Partial" introduction of scrum:

– Let's call use cases stories

– Word to Wiki

• Three week development cycles

• First product backlog

• Project manager becomes product owner

– High level features for releases put together by PO

2009: "Scrum But"

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• ~ 15 team members

• Version 1.0

– minimum viable product

– high degree of stress

• Split into two teams, introduction of Scrum of Scrum

• Technical debts

• Introduction of story point estimation using planning poker

2010: First Production Release

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Version History

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1 Sep 20101.0

26 Aug20112.1

27 Aug20123.0

13 Jul 20134.0

Summer20145.x

Good and Bad from theTrenches

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• Core Values! Great!

• Bodies and committees – PSB, LSC, TDC,SQA, AQ, MTV, GIA, ORM

• BPPM - Best Practice Project Management

– still alive and kicking

– project vs product thinking…

• Yearly planning and budgeting process

• Build vs run organizations

– Move to run mode, handover to maintenanceteam, aka "waste"

• How to identify and how to agree what'swaste and what's not

Hang on… is Swiss Re a Truly Agile Company?

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modernanalyst.com

• A physical board is not possible due totwo locations

• Jira with Rapid Board (aka Greenhopper)

• Confluence Wiki

– User documentation

– Specification

– Business documentation

– Technical documentation

• It took some time to get there

• Is Swiss Re lucky with this tooling?

Lean Tooling in an Enterprise

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Jira

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Confluence

• Communication and Collaboration

– Heavy users of Swiss Re's Web Based Conferencingplatform

– Lotus Notes Sametime for group and individual chats

Team Location and Setup – Collaboration….

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• Near Shoring – it'sgiven at the moment

• Lots of travelling

• Regular all teamworkshops andevents

• Build trust acrosslocations

The Waterfall Virus still Alive…

People stuck in Waterfall Thinking

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Defects, Defects, Defects

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Stabilization Sprints

1.2 2.1 2.5 3.1 3.5 4.0 4.2 5.0

• Lack of automation

– Being addressed, is a huge undertaking ifnot picked up from the beginning

• Incomplete acceptance tests

• Developers don't test their own codewell enough (not enough unit testing,not enough integration testing)

• Domain complexity (complex domainmodel, complex calculations, hard tovalidate)

• Too much load by PO, hence too muchwork in progress

Where are those Defects coming from?

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modernanalyst.com

Stories and Defects Correlation

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0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

1 1.1 1.2 2 2.1 2.5 3 3.1 3.5 4 4.1 4.2 5

Num

ber

of S

tori

es/D

efec

ts

Version

Stories vs Defects

Stories per Release

Defects per Release

"We know it,but…"

What's next?

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• More product focus (vs. project focus)

• Continuous delivery

– More frequent deployments to production

– Having a potentially shippable product each Sprint

– Strong investment into test automation

• Leaner specification, e.g. using "Specification by Example"

• Foster Lean/Agile knowledge within the Business organization

• "Delight the Customer"

PO/SM Wish List

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• Is it enough to count stories, and to drop story point estimation?

• Our own data supports above statement, correlation is 0.97!

• See Story Points considered harmful, Vasco Duarte

Changes in Estimation

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• It works! Even in a large organization!

• Training and education!

• The relationship between Business and IT improved with Agile/Scrum

• It's still very much bottom up, and based on energetic people

Conclusion

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Thank you!