This experience report will address the volatility, challenges and solutions implemented within a Fortune 500 Order to Delivery manufacturing program with the goal of re-engineering and aligning global business processes with Web-services and Service Oriented Architecture. The program utilizes large scale agile to manage multi-year planning of incremental releases with delivery of quantifiable business value in each release.
Initially, IT led the program by starting work on initial set of requirements using a waterfall approach. After transitioning to a large scale agile framework and increasing the involvement of the Business, the program continued to attempt delivery using large batches of work driven by annual funding cycles and led to limited delivery of value and significant technical debt. Instead, the program required an iterative and collaborative approach between Business and IT that delivered business value through incremental implementation and adoption of the new technology and processes.
The report will present the techniques used to help put the Business in the driver’s seat of the program through the development of a backlog using the TOGAF SOA Referential Architecture with Large-Scale Agile to define an series of incremental releases. The report will also describe an Agile Design and Elaboration (ADE) framework that was implemented to ensure traceability between the business process design and the production release of business capabilities. This framework facilitates collaborative dialogue between all stakeholders and reinforces an iterative Large-Scale Agile Delivery Lifecycle process. Finally, the report will identify challenges to some of the commonly held agile approaches, such as feature/story authoring and vertical slicing of work when developing business-centric services using a SOA framework for Enterprise modernization.
