Scaling Agile Adoption into the Enterprise: A Transition Community Based Approach

Presented by Aashish Vaidya, Cambia Health Solutions

Dates/Times: Thursday, Feb. 20^th, 2014: Networking @ 5:30-6:30 PM; Seminar 6:30-7:30 PM

Abstract:

Since July of 2011, Cambia Health Solutions, a not-for-profit health solutions company has been transitioning to enterprise wide agile practices. Cambia develops its own software solutions as well as integrates software from other vendors. It has a distributed workforce that spans four states with many work-at-home employees. Cambia’s health insurance business is regulated by various state and national entities. Many of Cambia’s deliverables are large, mandated compliance projects that have a fixed time box and a set scope, driven by external entities. Missing either the deadline or scope could potentially mean losing a significant portion of its business or facing monetary penalties. This brings unique challenges for effective agile adoption, where set templates, cookbooks and recipes may or may not be effective.

In order to transition from a patchwork of agile practices to large-scale agile, Cambia organized an Enterprise Transition Community and other communities. Initially, majority of the transition efforts were focused on rolling out agile to delivery teams and corresponding business areas. The experiences from this phase were shared during PNSQC 2012 presentation. Since, then the transition and transformation efforts continue to extend further at all levels: team, project and portfolio.

This presentation will draw on the experiences shared in the 2012 PNSQC paper as well as augment additional lessons learned during the subsequent year. It will provide insights to company of any size that is looking to make or is in process of making a similar transition. Agilists of all stripes can also benefit from practical in-the-trenches information to bring back to their own organizations.

Bio:

Aashish Vaidya is an IT Staff Consultant at Cambia Health Solutions. He is a founding member of Cambia’s Enterprise Transition Community, and other Best Practices Exchanges. Currently he works on large portfolio projects leading agile and quality practices. He also serves as an internal coach on Agile and Quality practices. Aashish has been involved in agile practices in the earnest since 2007, and is a Certified Scrum Professional. He has over 20+ years of experience working at technology companies such as Compaq, Intel, and Kronos Incorporation. He has held various technical, leadership and management positions. Aashish has been a presenter/panelist at AgilePDX, PNSQC conference and Technology Association of
Oregon. A recent article he co-authored appeared on AgileAtlas.org. He also muses on agile and management topics on his occasional blog agilesutra.wordpress.com. A graduate of Texas A&M University, Aashish holds Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering. He can also be found on twitter: @aashishvaidya and on Linkedin.

A Special Treat from PNSQC
Plan on coming early! In collaboration with the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) the SPIN meeting will have pizza and pop provided by PNSQC beginning at 5:30 pm.

PNSQC is the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, a group of volunteers interested in Software Quality. The Mission of the PNSQC is to enable knowledge exchange to produce higher quality software. As a non-profit, it seeks to promote software quality by providing education and opportunities for information exchange within the software community.

Thanks also to OTBC
We want to thank OTBC (http://www.otbc.org/) for providing the space for this talk.