Innovating with Agile Methodologies at John Deere

Running head: WEEK 02 ASSIGNMENT Week 02 Assignment Manuel Ricardo Cabral Ximenes AD 649 Agile Project Management Prof. Jim Hannon 1 WEEK 02 ASSIGNMENT 2 Abstract Agile innovation methods have revolutionized information technology. Over the past 25 to 30 years they have greatly increased success rates in software development, improved quality and speed to market, and boosted the motivation and productivity of IT teams. Now agile methodologies—which involve new values, principles, practices, and benefits and are a radical alternative to command-and-control-style management—are spreading across a broad range of industries and functions and even into the C-suite. This paper presents the case of John Deere, which uses agile methodologies to develop new software for its machines. It introduces the necessity of faster development, and rapid customer feedbacks to increase company value. In the same way is presented some modifications they introduced during implementation and the results. Finally, the paper presents a framework for implementing agile in the organization as a whole. WEEK 02 ASSIGNMENT 3 Week 02 Assignment One of the largest manufacturers of agricultural, construction and forestry machinery in the world, John Deere was founded in 1837 and is based in Moline, Illinois. At the beginning John Deere had a vision to help farmers in the Midwest. He fashioned a polished-steel plow in his Grand Detour, Illinois, blacksmith shop that lets pioneer farmers cut clean furrows through sticky Midwest prairie soil (Deere, 2017). Today, John Deere is listed as 85th in the Fortune 500 America’s ranking and 89th in the Forbes World’s Most Powerful Brands ranking (Gaubinger et al., 2015). Over the last decade, it has become clear that plain equipment is a means to an end that is to be utilized and optimized as an integral component in the context of ever changing business needs. Similar to what is happening in the automotive domain, software has been considered the main enabler for innovation and integrated customer solutions (Antonino et al., 2014). In this sense, it was clear that John Deere should leverage the potential of the software in its machines to deliver better value to the customers. The primary reason to think about introducing agile methodologies was to improve quality in the coding and productivity of teams. Improving productivity and quality is a key concern of any organization, but there are also some global trends that amplify the reasons why organizations are looking into ways to boost their performance (Laanti, 2014), for example; (1) New innovations and new technologies come to markets with increased speed (Moore, 2011); (2) Innovations area quickly copied, so there is a need for constant innovation to enable competitiveness (Zhou, 2006); (3) Publishing new software versions in the cloud has almost no cost once the cloud and the continuous deployment infrastructure is there (Abrahamsson, 2007); WEEK 02 ASSIGNMENT 4 and, (4) The need to be flexible is what drives investment in the markets due to the existing embedded unpredictability (Christopher, 2000). In John Deere, the move to agile came after some serious self-examination in their development teams (Rigby, Sutherland & Takeuchi, 2016). In many ways, the company’s software development had been carried out the same way they developed tractors and construction equipment (Goldsbury, 2012). John Deere was using waterfall-type development processes, where the requirements were set and then the coders got to work to produce the deliverable compatible with previous requirements (Holdorf, 2012). In order to remain competitive, they knew they needed to increase their speed to market while keeping budget and resources static. On the other hand, agile processes emphasize close collaboration and iterative development (Highsmith, 2003). John Deere’s main goals was to improve the most important aspects of its development efforts – speed to market, foster innovation, improve quality, guarantee customer focus and teamwork (Bloomberg, 2014). Agile met each of those needs and additionally helped with some of the quality aspects while breaking work down into smaller increments, also allowed higher management to put more eyes on the software code more often (Thibodeau, 2012), promoting increasingly transparency among teams as well. In its transition to agile John Deere replaced its cubicles with U-shaped pods that removed barriers to team interaction, furthermore assembled teams based on the project to be delivered and by sitting everyone together, which is extremely beneficial for teamwork, increased collaboration around what a customer wanted and needed (Gayer et al., 2016). They also moved about 800 software developers into an agile development process, and did so in just over a year. This effort involved recreating the farm equipment maker’s software development WEEK 02 ASSIGNMENT 5 effort around new teams that included developers, systems engineers, customer support and marketing personnel, testers, all working in close proximity (Thibodeau, 2012). The shift to agile software development introduced new roles in John Deere’s Organization chart, such as product owners, tech leads, and Scrum masters (Antonino et al., 2014). According to Steve Harty, former agile release train manager at John Deere, “moving our team to Scrum was scary, challenging, and liberating, all at the same time. Scrum was ‘our little secret’ that helped move our delivery time timeframe from 12-18 months to 2-4 weeks. Plus, our engineering teams were happier and customer satisfaction went up” (Bloomberg, 2014). Additional data supporting this shift was gathered by the time when agile was first introduced as a concept. The sponsors started to measure changes in team happiness, work quality and velocity. Quality, as measured by innovative product projects, also improved. Velocity, as measured by the amount of work accomplished each week, increased on all teams by more than 200%, with some exceeding 400% and one exceeding 700% (Rigby et al., 2015). According to Rigby et al. (2015) in order to implement agile in organizations you will need what they call an agile architecture, which in IT refers to the standards and technologies that enable collaboration across the enterprise. This “new” form of architecture is built on five pillars (Rigby et al., 2015): 1. Everyone on the same page. 2. Change in roles before change in structures. 3. Only one boss for decisions. 4. A focus on teams, not individuals. 5. Questions, not orders. WEEK 02 ASSIGNMENT 6 References Abrahamsson, P. (2007). Speeding up embedded software development. ITEA Innovation report. Antonino, P. O., Keuler, T., Germann, N., & Cronauer, B. (2014). A non-invasive approach to trace architecture design, requirements specification and agile artifacts. In Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC), 2014 23rd Australia (pp. 220-229). IEEE. Bloomberg, J. (2014). Scaling agile software development for digital transformation. Retrieved July 15th, 2017 from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2014/09/08/scalingagile-software-development-for-digital-transformation/#1a3068b1438d. Christopher, M. (2000). The agile supply chain: competing in volatile markets. Industrial marketing management, 29(1), 37-44. Deere, J. (2017). Our history. Retrieved July 15th, 2017 from https://www.deere.com/en/ourcompany/history/. Gaubinger, K., Rabl, M., Swan, S., & Werani, T. (2015). Innovation and Product Management. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Gayer, S., Herrmann, A., Keuler, T., Riebisch, M., & Antonino, P. O. (2016). Lightweight traceability for the Agile architect. Computer, 49(5), 64-71. Goldsbury, C. (2012). Your tractor was built with agile. Retrieved July 15th, 2017 from https://www.infoq.com/news/2012/03/deere. Highsmith, J. (2003). Agile Project Management: Principles and Tools. Arlington, MA: Cutter Consortium. Holdorf, C. (2012). John Deere ISG Agile Update. Retrieved July 15th, 2017 from https://es.slideshare.net/choldorf/john-deere-isg-agile-update. WEEK 02 ASSIGNMENT 7 Laanti, M. (2014). Characteristics and principles of scaled agile. In International Conference on Agile Software Development (pp. 9-20). Springer, Cham. Moore, G. A. (2011). Escape velocity: Free your company's future from the pull of the past. Harper Collins. Rigby, D. K., Berez, S., Caimi, G., & Noble, A. (2015). Agile innovation. Retrieved July 15th, 2017 from http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/agile-innovation.aspx#r1. Rigby, D. K., Sutherland, J., & Takeuchi, H. (2016). Embracing agile. Harvard Business Review, 94(5), 40-50. Thibodeau, P. (2012). John Deere plows into agile. Retrieved July 15th, 2017 from http://www.computerworld.com/article/2500298/app-development/john-deere-plows-intoagile.html. Zhou, K. Z. (2006). Innovation, imitation, and new product performance: The case of China. Industrial Marketing Management, 35(3), 394-402.