Simon Buck, Change Programme Manager at Symbian, spoke at the Agile Business Conference in London earlier this month.  He was very frank about the challenges he had seen in his career.  “The stuff that the software engineers were doing was always the wrong stuff,” he said.  “OK, I’m a project manager, I have a certain control over that.” But he saw a lot of things being developed to software priorities, not customer priorities and also things being developed that the customer didn’t pay for.

Buck’s twin frustrations were poor quality outputs and work of inappropriate priority that was often not used or even delivered. Something had to change, and it was him – he took a new job, at a company where these things were being addressed. Customer satisfaction went right up when at his new company, Symbian, which produces the operating systems for Nokia smart phones, started using the top 20 customer priorities for defects and requirements.

“I recommend the use of internal branding for change projects,” Buck said.  So, Project Panther – Agile by another name – was launched.  The idea was to convince the Board that Agile was a good way of managing projects.  The business case was based on three premises:

  • smart phones must be high quality
  • time to market
  • user experience versus technology i.e. the phones must meet user requirements, not just be technically advanced

This is a very tough area for competition, and it was important that the team kept those goals in sight.

In June 2008 they started a year long training programme to teach everyone Scrum. They had used Dean Leffingwell’s book, Scaling Software Agility, to provide a framework for enterprise agile projects.  The smallest chunk was a two week Scrum sprint.  A packaged increment was delivered in 2-3 months.  The longer term was the “architectural runway or epic”.

Agile can be propagated virally, Buck explained, but in the case of Symbian they did decide to do some pushing out of the techniques, especially in relation to forming Scrum teams. By the end of 2009 they had built over 100 Scrum teams, comprising 1000 engineers.

“It is quite hard,” he said. “The benefits of these big projects are often quite hard to state and even harder to measure.”  However, they have had a go at measuring and the results are impressive, if unofficial:

  • After Year 1: 19% of teams had a status of green.
  • In Year 2: 47% of teams had a status of green.

Year 2 also showed a 22% improvement in the decision making loop and an increase in user experience.  “It does show it takes time,” Buck said.

It might take time, and it might be a difficult journey.  But the experience at Symbian shows that it is possible to scale Agile for large development projects, and make it work.