Market moving toward smart devices for controlling building environments. This is new technology for the client. How will they approach the product delivery?

Challenges

• Only experience building “traditional” products; No experience creating a smart product
• Mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and software engineers work in separate silos
• Each group completes their portion of product work and hands off to the next group
• Integration of all product components occurs at end of product life cycle

Solutions

• Create a single team consisting of architect, designer, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and software engineers
• Provide Agile training with a focus on the “growth mindset” and the power of innovation and experimentation
• Provide training in Scrum, story writing and the value of incremental delivery

Benefits

• Silos removed between mechanical, electrical and software engineers; Each discipline developed a more global view of the products.
• Work with the business to define a smart environmental sensor module that can accommodate multiple types of sensors. The device can be controlled traditionally, via computer or mobile device.
• The Minimal Viable Product was a base board designed with removable modules which allowed the introduction of controlling the building environment with a smart device
• Extend the strength of the product through incremental product deliveries of new functionality:
  • Integrated temperature sensor
  • Integrated humidity sensor
  • Integrated pressure sensor

Challenges

• Wired division felt left out of technology innovation
• Business focused only on High Performing Teams
• Resistance from Business
• Some initial training was performed, but there was no comprehensive and ongoing training to overcome Plateau

Solutions

• Performed an assessment to understand current product life cycle
  processes and the amount of change that can be accepted
• Trained over 8,000 people across wireless and wired divisions. Target audience included PMO , PMs, BA, QA , Operations on The IT Side and trained Marketing , Compliance, Legal and Proposals teams for improved Business Agility
• Stood up Agile Team with PO, SM and Agile Coach to maximize application of learning from training and build good habits upfront.
• Used Agile coaches to support continuous development high performing teams

Benefits

• Cut the Cycle time for project funding from long term of over 1 year to MVP funding to reduce sunk cost and achieve first mover advantage
• Foster overarching Business Agility by on boarding Business functions in addition to IT
• 9 out of 10 participants were immediately able to apply what they have learned
• Identified 6 foundational practices (Product Owner, Chartering, Information Radiators, Daily Touch Point meetings, Collaboration Tools and Retrospective Reviews) to fit within existing life cycle which created a hybrid process of agility within the waterfall process
• Introduced concepts of both Scrum and Kanban methodologies to provide flexibility for teams to work with appropriate framework

Customers were becoming more dissatisfied with the amount of effort and time wasted to order a product through different methods i.e. phone, email, paper napkins, …

Challenges

• Cumbersome and time-consuming ordering process for sales staff and customers which could take days to a week to fulfill
• Build mobile app for use in both iOS and Android systems as well as a Web based application
• Great resistance from the business side which did not understand the proposed application use and value

Solutions

• Apply Agile Mindset and Scrum methodology to deliver product incrementally which allowed business side to understand product value
• Implement with Flutter/Dart for single code base to maximize and reduce maintenance
• Design an application that is self-serve for the customer

Benefits

• Reduce order process for customers from eleven steps to two steps which translates from multiple days to minutes
• Application runs on mobile and web (compatible with all browsers)
• Successfully demonstrated benefits of building a product using agile concepts and incremental delivery

Using Agile techniques successfully, but teams had hit a plateau and were not becoming higher performing. Additionally, product quality was inconsistent from team to team. Project was the integration of JIRA and ZEPHYR into software development workflow to support Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD).

Challenges

• Inconsistency use of CI and CD throughout teams and product lines resulting in a great variation in time to market for products
• Inconsistent use (or non-existent) of automated testing within the software development life cycle resulting in inconsistent quality of products

Solutions

• Integration of JIRA and ZEPHYR into software development workflow to create …
• Standardizing Test case format and Structure
• Configuring JIRA with sprint cycles, releases and build numbers
• Creating test cycles in ZEPHYR and assign test scenarios to test cycles
• Planning System Integrations Testing, User Acceptance Testing and Production Testing cycles
• Implemented automation testing components to augment delivery
• Scenario based test management and user interface
• Test data management for test scenarios in different environments
• Test scenario replay for generating test data in various formats for applications
• Data compare
• Test results management
• Test scenario execution status dashboard

Benefits

• Increased productivity of teams and moved toward becoming higher performing
• Deliver product faster to market with a higher and consistent quality
• Cost savings