I've done this a few times in my career. The first time it took about a year and a half. If you want to do this company-wide, you first need to get buy-in from the top. The CEO needs to understand it and needs to understand how it can save the company time and money. You then need to get the other stake holders involved. They need understand why it is important because they are your advocates. After that, it's all about tailoring it for your company.
From there, I built a internal website. The website defined each phase and provided an explanation of the deliverables of each phase along with templates of those deliverables. The templates provided people with something to start with; plus, it gets everyone using the same format, speaking the same language, walking the same walk.
I then took it one step further! I developed a 1-hour training session. I taught this session 13 times. I traveled to all of our offices (west coast and east coast). Every person from the CEO to the Admins had to take this training. This was an excellent way to get everyone to understand the process. The first 30 minutes of the session went through an explanation of each phase and their deliverables (just like the website). In order make this meaningful from a hands-on standpoint, I wanted to come up with something that everyone could relate to. I took the deliverables from "building a house" and wrote them on sets of index cards. The group broke into small teams and their assignment was to take those deliverables and organize them into the proper phases. At the end of the session, everyone walked away with a good understanding of the process.
Now that training was complete, we still had one more task to perform in order to drive it home: a test case. We took a small project and ran it through the process. We took that same project and did the old way. What do you think we found out? We would have saved $200K on this one project by working it through our methodology.
This was a very rewarding experience which has allowed me to continue to roll out Agile, company-tailored methodologies to several companies.
____________________
Nancy Dirgo has held several technology management positions in companies from start ups to large-size companies. She now is pursuing her interests in the Medical and Healthcare industries with Medical Devices and software. She also enjoys consulting for companies in the areas of engineering leadership, program/project management and software development.
From there, I built a internal website. The website defined each phase and provided an explanation of the deliverables of each phase along with templates of those deliverables. The templates provided people with something to start with; plus, it gets everyone using the same format, speaking the same language, walking the same walk.
I then took it one step further! I developed a 1-hour training session. I taught this session 13 times. I traveled to all of our offices (west coast and east coast). Every person from the CEO to the Admins had to take this training. This was an excellent way to get everyone to understand the process. The first 30 minutes of the session went through an explanation of each phase and their deliverables (just like the website). In order make this meaningful from a hands-on standpoint, I wanted to come up with something that everyone could relate to. I took the deliverables from "building a house" and wrote them on sets of index cards. The group broke into small teams and their assignment was to take those deliverables and organize them into the proper phases. At the end of the session, everyone walked away with a good understanding of the process.
Now that training was complete, we still had one more task to perform in order to drive it home: a test case. We took a small project and ran it through the process. We took that same project and did the old way. What do you think we found out? We would have saved $200K on this one project by working it through our methodology.
This was a very rewarding experience which has allowed me to continue to roll out Agile, company-tailored methodologies to several companies.
____________________
Nancy Dirgo has held several technology management positions in companies from start ups to large-size companies. She now is pursuing her interests in the Medical and Healthcare industries with Medical Devices and software. She also enjoys consulting for companies in the areas of engineering leadership, program/project management and software development.
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