Embracing Open Agility: Tales From Our Company-Wide Transformation

Does VeriShip use components from:

Scrum? Yes.

Kanban? Yes

Lean Startup? Yes.

DevOps? Yes.

Extreme Programming? Yes.

Stuff we’ve completely made up? Yes.

People Operations? Yes. You might say this isn’t an Agile framework, but we disagree. Without a positive work culture and a strong sense of safety, nothing else is possible.

The truth is no two teams are alike, so why try to treat them the same? We have combined components from all the above, in addition to Red Hat’s Open Organization philosophy, Kerievsky’s Modern Agile concepts, Business Agility practices, and everything in between, into a rolled-up version of what we now refer to as “Open Agility at VeriShip.” Our ENTIRE organization (including non-engineering teams) works every day utilizing various methodologies and approaches to promote openness, visibility, safety, and continuous improvement in the workplace.

Our presentation will focus on our experiences during our company-wide transformation. We’ll focus on the experiments we’ve tried, successes we’ve had and, most importantly, our failures and what we’ve learned along the way. We kept looking for the right book that would answer all our questions, and quickly found, that book doesn’t exist. What we have found though, is that DATA MATTERS. We’ll talk through non-traditional metrics we’ve used that have been exponentially helpful in showing our progress during our Agile transformation. We’ll also talk about the champions we found along the way that helped us on our journey. We encourage active participation from the group to share in their experiences as well. We’re all in this together and we can all learn from each other.