Author: Elizabeth Walsh

Six Practices for De-Commodifying the Scrum Master and Unleashing Team Greatness

Posted on May 18, 2023 by - Agile & DevOps

It is painful to watch how some enterprises treat the Scrum Master role like a commodity: Scrum Masters are all the same and easily exchangeable. A generic input and an expense to be reduced. They are often treated more as administrators and scribes than as critical enablers for delivering superior economic outcomes. As a result, the Scrum Master role is often viewed as a dead-end with no growth opportunity.

The Commodity Attitude and Agility

This commodity attitude is tragic for the individual laboring under this mindset and economically limiting for the enterprise. This mindset robs the enterprise of the Scrum Master’s and one of Agile’s fundamental value propositions: superior economic outcomes through our way of working.

The Agile Manifesto’s first declaration, “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”, calls out the dramatic influence our ways of working together have on outcomes.

From study after study—from Scottish coal miners in the 1950s to NUMMI, the joint Toyota-GM venture in the 1980s, and even on nuclear submarines—we have learned that a key determinant to successful outcomes is how people work together.

This is Why I Am in This Crazy Agile Coaching/Mentoring Business

Six Practices for De-Commodifying the Scrum Master and Unleashing Team GreatnessYears ago, I believed that to deliver great products, you just assembled raw engineering talent and then got out of the way. My eyes would roll up whenever our leadership talked about methodology and practices.

I could not have been more wrong.

After quite a few hard lessons and some mentoring from the CEO of an amazing startup—Ken Spencer of Creo Products—I learned firsthand how people work together is an outsized driver of economic outcomes. Alistair Cockburn succinctly summed this up in his quip “People trump process.”

Agile as a Competitive Advantage

In most Agile frameworks, the Scrum Master role is primarily concerned with the team’s way of working. When we treat our Scrum Masters as commodities—interchangeable and as a cost to be reduced—we are demonstrating that we do not regard our way of working as a competitive advantage.

Unfortunately, commodity cultures struggle with sensing and responding to opportunities and threats in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. Commodity cultures find it hard to exploit change for economic benefit.

So, if we believe our way of working is a competitive advantage, then how do we de-commodify the Scrum Master role and acknowledge the value this role brings?

Six Guidelines for De-Commodifying the Scrum Master

Here are six guidelines for de-commodifying the Scrum Master role and turning it into a contributor to Agile success:

1. Understanding What the Scrum Master’s Role IS NOT

First, let’s be perfectly clear, the Scrum Master is not an administrator putting meetings on people’s calendars. They are not a scribe taking notes from those meetings to present to a project manager. And most certainly, they are not a project manager assigning and dictating tasks to the team.

2. Understanding What the Scrum Master’s Role IS

Their job is helping the team be a team and not a group of people who happen to work together. Their job is to help them discover their greatness as a team. Yes, I know this sounds fuzzy, but after being in this industry for nearly 40 years, I have discovered one truth: the fuzzy stuff drives economic outcomes.

Orgs must acknowledge that the Scrum Master role is primarily a coaching role. In fact, I like to say their job is to put me (an Agile coach) out of a job. Coaching is an intimate relationship with a team and is very much influenced by personality types. An individual who is a rock star with one team could fall flat with another. A team should be able to interview their Scrum Master, even if it is a team member who is being considered for the role.

3. Position the Scrum Master Role as an Opportunity for Advancement

Six Practices for De-Commodifying the Scrum Master and Unleashing Team GreatnessThird, the Scrum master role must be seen as an opportunity to advance one’s career by developing strong facilitation and coaching skills. These are essential skills for anyone seeking a leadership role in an enterprise regardless of whether they see themselves as a manager or a senior engineer. Leaders must learn it’s not about making themselves appear great but about making others great.

The Scrum Master role is an excellent gateway to developing those skills. Contract Scrum Masters bring valuable new skills into the enterprise and can help start an organization on their Agile journey by mentoring and coaching internal Scrum Masters. However, to truly grow an agile organization, the Scrum Master role should be performed by someone who desires to grow their career with the enterprise.

4. Acknowledge That the Scrum Master is Not Always a Full-Time Role

Fourth, the Scrum Master role should not be a full-time job description.

A newly formed team may need full-time coaching to help them speed up their journey through the Tuckman curve (forming, storming, norming, and performing). However, as the team begins to function as a team, the direct coaching demands of the Scrum Master will diminish.

Personally, I prefer an appropriate team member who has leadership aspirations to receive 50% release time from their regular responsibilities to fulfill this role. Other enterprises may have a Scrum Master facilitate multiple teams.

5. Delegate the Running of the Team to the Scrum Master and Their Team

Fifth, delegate ownership of the team’s way of working to the Scrum Masters and their team.

Far too many enterprises are obsessed with “maturity,” which is often code for rigid compliance to some centrally defined framework or methodology. This compliance mindset impedes relentless improvement. Agile is about sensing and responding to change, and the way of working must also sense and respond to change. Practices introduced by Agile frameworks are a good starting point but were never intended to be a methodological straight jacket. After all, why do we have retrospectives if not to improve our way of working?

A discipline of “improvement experiments” can serve as an important guardrail on the evolution of the teams’ way of working. Most importantly, when the team owns their way of working, they will need time and space to focus collectively on improving their way of working. It’s not going to happen “after hours”.

6. Set Up a Support System for the Scrum Master

Finally, don’t let the Scrum Masters stand alone. Set up a supporting ecosystem for the Scrum Masters to share, learn, and improve together.

Do this by establishing a Scrum Master community of practices (CoP). The CoP becomes the focal point for mutual support and collectively driving improvement. During practice meetings, Scrum Masters can seek advice and share their experiences. A simple mantra we have for the Scrum Master CoP is, “we’ve got your back!” Through the CoP, Scrum Masters can drive improvement by sharing the results of improvement stories and deciding on improvement stories to add to their respective backlogs.

How an enterprise treats its Scrum Masters is a barometer of the value it places on its way of working.

  • Are the Scrum Masters seen as valuable drivers and contributors to relentlessly improving outcomes, or are they seen as just another commodity and all the same and interchangeable?
  • Do they foster team growth or is their job to perform administrative and reporting tasks for the team?
  • Is their role to actively drive process improvement or to enforce compliance with fossilized standard operating procedures and practices?

How we answer these questions is the difference between “doing Agile” and being agile.

The Portfolio Kanban System & Lean Portfolio Management

Posted on May 16, 2023 by - Agile & DevOps, Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM)

Since their initial creation decades ago, both Agile and Lean management principles have fueled the continuous improvement of organizations across dozens of industries. 

While these complementary principles can serve as efficiency and growth catalysts, applying them to portfolio management can be a bit of a heavy lift. Thankfully, your organization can speed up the process by leveraging the Portfolio Kanban system. Let’s explore how you can apply this portfolio management tool to create agile teams.

What Is the Portfolio Kanban System?

The Portfolio Kanban System & Lean Portfolio ManagementThe traditional Kanban framework helps team members streamline their workflows via visualization techniques. By envisioning available resources, workflows, and developmental processes, you can proactively identify potential bottlenecks and improve the flow of knowledge across your teams. 

The Kanban system is used by some of the world’s top companies, including:

  • Toyota
  • Spotify
  • Pixar
  • Apple

The Portfolio Kanban system is built on the foundation of the traditional Kanban methodology and, as its name implies, aligns well with portfolio management. Your organization can use the Kanban framework to manage and visualize the flow of its portfolio Epics. You can track every stage of an Epics portfolio’s lifecycle, from ideation to completion.

Specifically, the Portfolio Kanban system enables teams to:

  • Use Work in Progress (WIP) limits to align demand with capacity
  • Identify opportunities for continuous improvement 
  • Simplify workflows, designing policies to govern transitions from each work state

The Portfolio Kanban system is often used with other Kanban systems, including solution, program, and team frameworks. Together, these systems will enable your organization to apply Lean and Agile management principles to its processes, portfolios, and departments. 

How Does this Portfolio Management Framework Contribute to Lean/Agile Development?

The Kanban Portfolio system directly aligns with the fundamental principles of Lean/Agile development. The five core Lean principles are as follows:

  • Identify value
  • Map the value stream
  • Create flow
  • Establish pull
  • Seek perfection

The Kanban Portfolio methodology supports the application of all five of these principles during portfolio management. By visualizing portfolios with Kanban, business leaders can identify value and then trace those value streams throughout the portfolio lifecycle. 

Likewise, the Kanban Portfolio framework supports the application of Agile principles by enabling users to identify critical interactions during each stage of a portfolio’s lifecycle while also promoting agility and empowering organizational leaders to respond to change. 

How Does the Portfolio Kanban System Work?

The Portfolio Kanban system consists of six essential steps, which are as follows:

Funnel Ideas

During the funneling stage, you and your executive action team (EAT) will capture high-level ideas, including cost savings and new business opportunities, marketplace changes, acquisitions, and challenges with existing solutions. 

There is no need to hash out each idea in great detail here; simply describe each concept with a brief phrase, such as “implement account self-service tools.”

Review

After your team members have finished funneling ideas, they can begin targeting specific concepts to sponsor. The sponsor of a concept needs to transform it into a fully defined epic. 

As part of this process, they will need to expand on the definition of the epic, outline the benefits achieving said change would yield, and determine which metrics should quantify business outcomes. 

Analyze

The Portfolio Kanban System & Lean Portfolio ManagementEpic owners will pull the most promising epics into the analysis stage. During analysis, your team members must define the minimum viable product (MVP) threshold, create a Lean business case, obtain preliminary customer validation, and outline the scope of the epic. After analysis, the Portfolio Manager will make a final go/no-go decision. 

Create a Backlog

Epics that pass the analysis stage are moved into a portfolio backlog based on their weighted shortest job first (WSJF) rating. The WSJF algorithm rates initiatives based on factors that include relative business value, opportunity enablement, and time criticality. 

Implement

When WIP limits permit, the team selects an epic from the backlog and inserts it into the pipeline. The Epic Owner and your agile teams begin developing the MVP and testing their initial hypothesis. Work continues until the team either proves or disproves the theory or burns through all the funds allocated to the project. 

Conclude the Project

A Portfolio Kanban project is complete when the following conditions are met:

  • The Epic Owner disproves the hypothesis
  • The LPM ejects the epic from the Kanban 
  • The hypothesis is proven, but continued portfolio governance is deemed unnecessary 

The Epic Owner and their teams are reallocated to another project upon completion. 

Final Thoughts

The Portfolio Kanban system is a staple of the SAFe framework for a reason. It is a portfolio management tool that facilitates the implementation of Agile and Lean principles in a manner that makes a meaningful impact on your organization. 

If your organization is fiercely pursuing continuous improvement through Agile/Lean development, the Portfolio Kanban system is a precious resource you should not ignore. 

Learn more about Lean Portfolio Management from the experts at Cprime.

Finally, Safe 6.0 Puts Continuous Learning Culture Where It Belongs

Posted on May 9, 2023 by - Agile & DevOps, Organizational Change & Culture

There is a real buzz in the SAFe community with the new changes in SAFe 6.0…

  • Strengthening the foundation for business agility
  • Empowering teams
  • Accelerating flow
  • Enhancing business agility across the business
  • Building the future with AI, Big Data, and Cloud, and
  • Delivering better outcomes with measure and grow and OKRs

Something that may have gotten lost with the buzz created by these themes is how the continuous learning culture competency has finally become part of the foundation for strengthening business agility.

For myself, this is a reminder that the continuous learning culture competency is not some afterthought or nice-to-have competency, but rather a foundational competency like Lean-Agile leadership. Why is this important?

SAFe 6.0 is about business agility

Finally, Safe 6.0 Puts Continuous Learning Culture Where It BelongsSAFe 6.0 is a framework for business agility. Business agility is the organizational capability for achieving economic advantage by sensing and responding faster than our competitors.

To do this, we need to learn faster than our competitors. And that means developing a continuous learning culture. Moving the continuous learning culture competency icon from its former side position in the framework to the foundation bar finally realizes the critical importance of continuous learning for business agility.

But sensing and responding to change is not just about learning and exploiting new business opportunities, as suggested by the Business Agility value stream. It’s also about sensing and responding to new opportunities to improve our way of working. Our ways of working must also embrace change through learning. Through iteration retrospectives, inspect-and-adapt problem-solving workshops, measure-and-grow workshops, and communities of practices, we have opportunities to improve our way of working iteratively. I often tell my clients if your way of working is the same two years from now as it is today, then you have missed the point.

Avoiding “cargo cult Agile”…

There is a misperception in much of our industry that if we can ritualistically execute a set of Agile practices, we will be agile. Thus, we often use the term “cargo cult Agile” to refer to this mindset.

No framework is immune to the cargo cult mindset. For example, SAI provides the Big Picture and a wealth of training assets and supporting resources that enable large organizations to get started on their business agility journey. Unfortunately, these same enabling assets which help start the journey can devolve into a cargo cult of prescriptive practices if the organizations do not develop a continuous learning competency. Worse, when leadership lacks a growth mindset, their go to strategy is often to strictly enforce compliance with the practices that make it easy to begin.

…by using SAFe as directed

Finally, Safe 6.0 Puts Continuous Learning Culture Where It BelongsSAFe roles, practices, and artifacts come from proven patterns for realizing Agile and Lean principles. There is nothing sacred about the practices themselves. They are practices to help you begin with realizing business agility throughout the enterprise. They are not rules. If you want to adjust, you simply need data to inform your decisions.

Improvement backlog items need to be written just like a feature with a benefit hypothesis. We need to know what useful performance and outcome data we can collect to determine if the improvement brought real benefit. Otherwise, when adapting and evolving practices, we are at risk of changing the practice because we don’t want to make the necessary changes to realize business agility. How many times have we heard teams complain that they can’t get anything done in a short timebox and ask if we can lengthen the timebox?

It comes back to continuous learning

This is why I am excited to see the continuous learning culture competency added to the foundation for business agility. Without developing both the Lean-Agile leadership and continuous learning culture, it is unlikely an organization can derive the benefits of business agility, regardless of how many practices they can precisely execute.

Dive deeper into all the changes in SAFe 6.0.

Data Integration Techniques—Which Should You Use?

Posted on May 4, 2023 by - Data, Integration & Governance

Today’s business is built around data and the algorithms that process it to extract the maximum value. The average company also uses dozens of apps and filing systems to generate, analyze, and store that data, often making it hard to gain value from it. Data integration merges the data from disparate systems, enabling a full view of all the information flowing through an organization and revealing a wealth of valuable business insights.

What is Data Integration?

Data integration is the process of combining data from various sources into one unified view for efficient data management in order to derive meaningful insights and gain actionable intelligence.

In a business tech environment made up of thousands of apps and platforms, data integration techniques and tools aim to aggregate data regardless of its type, structure, or volume. It is an integral part of a data pipeline, encompassing data ingestion, data processing, transformation, and storage for easy retrieval.

Benefits of Data Integration and Why We Need it

Data Integration Techniques—Which Should You Use?Companies gather enormous volumes of data from various sources. For data to be meaningful, it must be accessible for analysis. Yet fresh data enters the organization every second, in multiple formats, and is stored in various locations.

Without unified data, a single report typically involves logging into multiple accounts on multiple sites, accessing data within native apps, copying the data, reformatting, and cleansing, all before analysis can happen.

The solution—data integration—offers a number of advantages:

  • Improves collaboration – Employees in various departments and locations need access to the company’s data for shared and individual projects. And, they’re generating their own data all the time. Data integration allows self-service access to the company’s data across all lines of business, often in real-time, automatically.
  • Saves time and boosts efficiency – Automated data integration techniques cut down significantly on the time required to prepare and analyze that data, reducing or eliminating manual data collection. And, it saves the dev team from having to regularly create new ad hoc integration tools for one-off analyses.
  • Reduces errors and rework – Anytime you remove manual effort from the equation, error rates go down. Flawed analysis based on simple human error in the data collection or translation process can cost both time and money. With automatically synchronized data, these issues are all but eliminated.
  • Improved visibility in real-time – In many cases, data integration can remove the need to re-run reports as data changes, since automated reports and dashboards will continually update in real-time once the integration is established.

Key Data Integration Use Cases

Let’s focus on the four primary use cases that require various data integration techniques:

  • Data ingestion
  • Data replication
  • Data warehouse automation
  • Big data integration

Data Ingestion

The data ingestion process involves moving data from a variety of sources to a storage location such as a data warehouse or data lake. Ingestion can be streamed in real time or in batches and typically includes cleaning and standardizing the data to be ready for a data analytics tool. Examples of data ingestion include migrating your data to the cloud or building a data warehouse, data lake, or data lake house.

Data Replication

In the data replication process, data is copied and moved from one system to another—for example, from a database in the data center to a data warehouse in the cloud. This ensures that the correct information is backed-up and synchronized to operational uses. Replication can occur in bulk, in batches on a scheduled basis, or in real time across data centers and/or the cloud.

Data Warehouse Automation

The data warehouse automation process accelerates the availability of analytics-ready data by automating the data warehouse lifecycle—from data modeling and real-time ingestion to data marts and governance.

Big Data Integration

Data Integration Techniques—Which Should You Use?Moving and managing the massive volume, variety, and velocity of big data requires advanced tools and techniques. Your big data integration system needs intelligent big data pipelines that can automatically move, consolidate, and transform big data from multiple data sources while maintaining lineage. It must have high scalability, performance, profiling, and data quality capabilities to handle real-time, continuously streaming data.

Data Integration Techniques

There are five different approaches, or patterns, to execute data integration:

  • ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load)
  • ELT (Extract, Load, and Transform)
  • Data streaming
  • Application integration via API (Application programming interface)
  • Data virtualization

To implement these data integration techniques, data engineers, architects and developers can either manually code an architecture using Structured Query Language (SQL), or more often, they set up and manage data integration tools, which streamline development and automate the system.

ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load)

An ETL pipeline is a traditional type of data pipeline which converts raw data to match the target system via three steps: extract, transform and load. Data is transformed in a staging area before it is loaded into the target repository (typically a data warehouse). This allows for fast and accurate data analysis in the target system and is most appropriate for small datasets which require complex transformations. For example, the data consolidation approach for cloud data integration is based on ETL technology. 

ELT (Extract, Load, and Transform)

In the more modern ELT pipeline, the data is loaded immediately and then transformed within the target system, typically a cloud-based data lake or data warehouse. This approach is more appropriate when datasets are large and timeliness is important, since loading is often quicker. ELT operates either on a micro-batch or change data capture (CDC) timescale. Micro-batch, or “delta load,” only loads the data modified since the last successful load. CDC continually loads data as and when it changes on the source.

Data Streaming

Instead of loading data into a new repository in batches, streaming data integration moves data continuously in real-time from source to target. Modern data integration (DI) platforms can deliver analytics-ready data into streaming and cloud platforms, data warehouses, and data lakes.

Application integration via API (Application programming interface)

Data Integration Techniques—Which Should You Use?Application integration through an API allows separate applications to work together by moving and syncing data between them. This can support operational needs, such as ensuring that your HR system has the same data as your finance system. Since various applications usually have unique APIs for giving and taking data, Software as a Service (SaaS) application automation tools like Workato can help you create and maintain native API integrations efficiently and at scale.

Data Virtualization

Like streaming, data virtualization also delivers data in real time by virtually combining data from different systems, but only on demand. Virtualization and streaming are well suited for transactional systems built for high performance queries.

Challenges of Data Integration

Taking several data sources and turning them into a unified whole within a single structure is a technical challenge unto itself. Here are some common challenges that organizations face in building their data integration platform:

  1. How to get to the finish line — Anyone implementing data integration must understand what types of data need to be collected and analyzed, where that data comes from, the systems that will use the data, what types of analysis will be conducted and how frequently data and reports will need to be updated. This can be an overwhelming task for most IT teams.
  2. Data from legacy systems — Integration efforts may need to include data stored in legacy systems. That data, however, is often missing markers such as times and dates for activities, which more modern systems commonly include, making integration very difficult.
  3. Data from newer business demands — New systems today are generating different data (such as unstructured or real-time) from many sources such as videos, IoT devices, sensors, and cloud. Adapting your infrastructure to integrate all this data is critical, but it’s extremely difficult as the volume, the speed, and the new format of data all pose new challenges.
  4. External data — Data taken in from external sources may not arrive at the same level of detail as internal sources, making it difficult to examine with the same rigor. Also, contracts in place with external vendors may make it difficult to share data across the organization.
  5. Keeping up — Once a data integration platform is up and running, the task isn’t done. The data team must keep the data integration service on par with best practices, as well as the latest demands from the organization and regulatory agencies.

Data Integration Tools

Agile_Facilitation_Medium_black_coralData integration tools and techniques are available across a broad range of organizational levels, from fully automated to manual methods. Typical tools and techniques for data integration include:

  • Manual Integration or Common User Interface: There is no unified view of the data. Users operate with all relevant information, accessing all the source systems.
  • Application Based Integration: Requires each application to implement all the integration efforts; manageable with a small number of applications.
  • Middleware Data Integration: Transfers integration logic from an application to a new middleware layer.
  • Uniform Data Access: Leaves data in the source systems and provides  a unified view to users across the enterprise.
  • Common Data Storage or Physical Data Integration: Creates a new system for storing a copy of the data from the source system, which is managed independently.

Developers may use SQL to code a data integration system by hand. There are also data integration toolkits available from various IT vendors that streamline, automate, and document the development process.

The optimal data integration tool will:

  1. Support flexible pipelines
  2. Provide numerous integrations
  3. Include a built-in job scheduler
  4. Include job triggers
  5. Provide an intuitive interface

Data integration allows you to analyze and act upon a reliable, single source of up-to-date data you can trust. This allows analysts, data scientists and businesspeople to use BI and analytics tools to identify patterns and produce actionable insights that improve performance and help you compete.

The best way to get an ideal data integration strategy is to have a trusted professional partner. Contact Cprime specialists to get professional help and see what insights your data can deliver.

How to Apply Agile to Non-Software Work

Posted on May 2, 2023 by - Agile & DevOps

The concept of “Agile” has been tied to software development mainly because of the 2001 publication, The Manifesto for Agile Software Development (a.k.a. the “Agile Manifesto”) which popularized this idea. Written by a group of software professionals, this artifact helped many teams apply a new way of working, which arguably revolutionized the way software applications are designed and delivered.

What is not commonly known is that the philosophy and values behind this Manifesto originated decades ago from manufacturing; Toyota Motors was the very first organization that conceived values such as short feedback loops, optimize flow of work, limiting work-in-progress, etc. This also means that the concepts and practices of Agile can be applied to almost any type of work that you do – from recruiting to marketing to business development, Agile practices can accelerate the delivery of nearly any product or service.

This sounds too good to be true, correct? Let’s take a closer look at a few examples of how Agile techniques can be applied to non-software projects.

Agile is NOT just for software?!

How to Apply Agile to Non-Software WorkIn my experience working with Agile teams over the past few years, I discovered a trend that is somewhat surprising – many people believe that “Agile” is synonymous to “Scrum”, which is not the case. This misconception has often led to the belief that if you want to “do Agile”, you must “do Scrum”, or apply Scrum-like practices. This is simply not the case. It is very possible to apply Agile principles and practices without adhering to the guidelines offered by the Scrum framework. Why does this matter, you may wonder. This is an interesting take on the Agile approach because you can apply Agile practices without practicing all of the events that Scrum requires, which means that Agile is potentially much simpler than you imagined!

How to apply Agile techniques even if you are not developing software

Here are a few practices (and questions) to consider when you are working on a non-software/non-technical project:

Start with what you do now

There is no need to abandon everything you do today for the sake of “doing Agile”. It is entirely possible (and likely) that many of the processes and/or tools that you are using today provide value and are quite effective, even if you have a desire to improve what you do now. It is absolutely okay to keep many of the tools and procedures that are already in place. The trick is to explore what makes sense to change. More on that shortly.

Consider where your pain-points are

What is keeping you or your team up at night? Where are the inefficiencies? What do your customers complain about the most? These are all questions that could lead to interesting insights if you dig a little deeper and spend some time to assess the root cause. These repetitive issues will likely provide you with a great starting point to apply Agile methods. A few examples are: long feedback cycles, lack of visibility into state of tasks and/or projects, quality issues, scope/requirements creep, etc.

What work can you complete in a short period of time?

Looking at the work your team is doing, how can you break down the work into smaller units? This may take a bit of experimentation, but if you can deconstruct work into less complex pieces, you could improve your ability to deliver a working solution more quickly, thus giving your customer an earlier view and the opportunity to provide feedback.

How often does your team reflect on how they collaborate?

How to Apply Agile to Non-Software WorkWhen was the last time they thought about how to improve their processes and/or tools? Agile way of working is inherently iterative in nature, which means there should be natural checkpoints for the team to inspect their way of working and make adjustments as needed. The mindset of continuous improvement is not always easy for teams to adopt, but it will provide benefits once the team can establish a healthy routine of regularly reviewing how they work together.

How much work is your team trying to do at the same time?

Multi-tasking is a big “no no” in Agile because it takes away focus and erodes customer confidence when you start a lot of work but finish very little. Limiting your “WIP”, or Work In Progress, is one of the key tenets of Agile that is often forgotten. Reducing your WIP sounds easy enough to do, but it is often quite difficult for most of us who are accustomed to doing so, and it will require practice and persistence.

How often do you showcase your work to the customer?

Providing visibility and being transparent about successes and failures is not always easy, especially if you have a demanding customer who is used to getting what they ask for. A key tenet of Agile is close collaboration with the customer, which means partnering with them and being open and honest about everything. Again, not always easy to do, but it will build trust and confidence over time if you can work with the initial challenges.

Conclusion

In closing, you may have noticed that in this article, I did not suggest any technical practices that are specifically related to any Agile framework. While some of these ideas may feel a bit vague and general, I am hoping that you can find a real-world project with which you can try some of these techniques. You can see that none of these approaches are specifically intended for software projects, which means they can be applied to just about any type of project that you are working on. My final recommendation: choose a project that is not too small but not mission-critical so that you can apply one or two of these methods as an experiment. If you can make a commitment to giving this a try, I guarantee that you will learn something unexpected.

What is the difference between Atlassian Jira and Jira Service Management?

Posted on April 25, 2023 by - Platform Adoption & Governance

When it comes to managing complex initiatives, businesses can often benefit from selecting the right collaborative software.

Atlassian’s Jira and Jira Service Management (JSM) are powerful tools that provide exceptional project management solutions. Jira is the more traditional option, focusing strongly on issue tracking and agile project management. Jira Service Management builds on this foundation by offering a range of added features specifically designed for IT and service teams, including incident management, problem management, and change management.

With both options offering robust customization capabilities and integrations with a wide range of other software, it can be tough to choose between them. So which one is right for your business? Let’s inspect the key differences between Jira and JSM to help you make an informed decision.

The Key Features of Atlassian Jira Software

What is the difference between Atlassian Jira and Jira Service Management?Atlassian Jira is a powerful project management tool used by thousands of organizations worldwide. With its user-friendly interface and robust features, Jira makes it easy to track and manage complex projects.

One of the key features of Jira is its flexibility—users can create customized workflows to fit their specific needs. Another standout feature is its extensive reporting options, which allow users to generate a variety of reports on project progress, team performance, and more. Collaboration is also a key aspect of Jira, with built-in tools for team communication and task assignment. Jira Software provides functions for supporting the two principal ways people do “Agile” development—essentially they give you Scrum and Kanban boards (and the supporting structures behind them). Jira Software is licensed based on total users.

This powerful project management tool offers a range of benefits that can help your business stay on top of tasks and projects. With features like real-time collaboration, task assignment and tracking, and customizable workflows, Jira streamlines communication and enables teams to work more efficiently. Plus, the platform integrates with a range of other tools including Confluence and Slack, making it easy to keep all your work in one place.

How JSM Can Streamline Your Service Desk Solutions

Jira Service Management, on the other hand, is designed to provide IT service management (ITSM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) solutions by offering an easy-to-use self-service portal, request management, SLAs, queues, and incident management. Jira Service Management is licensed based on total agents (users able to edit/work on requests). Customers (users submitting requests) can access the product for free and do not need a license.

As businesses continue to evolve, their customer support and service desk solutions require advanced tools to meet increasing customer expectations. JSM helps businesses of all sizes streamline their service desk solutions, improving the efficiency of their support teams, and delivering a better customer experience.

Atlassian Jira Service Management offers an intuitive user interface, making it easy for users to navigate and manage service requests efficiently. This platform also allows automation of recurring tasks, reducing response times, and freeing up the service desk team’s time for other high-priority tasks.

What is the difference between Atlassian Jira and Jira Service Management?JSM also offers multiple scalability options, including customizable workflows, powerful templates, and automation rules. These features make it easier for businesses to stay competitive, regardless of their size and scope.

The solution also integrates with other Atlassian products, such as Jira Software and Confluence, and with a host of third-party apps. These integrations enable businesses to collaborate seamlessly to resolve service issues, creating a perfect workflow for more efficient decision-making.

Also, it offers a wide range of self-help features, including a central knowledge base and the ability to create and publish articles to solve user problems, which increases customer satisfaction levels.

Which of these solutions is right for you?

Of course, only you can answer that based on your unique business needs. Many organizations find that using both Jira and JSM optimizes different aspects of their business. In other cases, one or the other could fill a gap where an existing solution falls short; utilizing available app integrations or creating custom integrations can then marry the two solutions.

If you’d like help evaluating these powerful Atlassian applications, rely on the Atlassian experts at Cprime to help.

Cprime Receives Atlassian Partner of the Year 2022: Agile at Scale Solutions

Posted on April 19, 2023 by - Company News

Cprime Receives Atlassian Partner of the Year 2022: Agile at Scale SolutionsWe’re thrilled to share that Cprime has received Atlassian Partner of the Year 2022: Agile at Scale Solutions. Read the official press release here. This is the seventh time we’ve received this distinction, and it’s just as exciting as it was the first time.

We’ve been an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner for over eight years now, and we hold specializations in Cloud, ITSM, Jira Align, and Agile at Scale (the category of this year’s award.)

There are so many talented people and organizations represented in the Atlassian Partners ecosystem, but just 26 were recognized as Partners of the Year in various categories. To qualify, we had to outperform dozens of highly-qualified competitors through exceptional efforts in developing new business, thought leadership, and products and services that complement Atlassian.

Our CEO, Zubin Irani, pointed out two important reasons we value this achievement: “It highlights our strong relationship with Atlassian, and speaks volumes about the results we achieve for our clients.”

But how, exactly, do we achieve those results?

What does Cprime offer as an Atlassian Platinum Solutions Partner?

Our wide range of Atlassian-related products and services ensure that we can meet our customers where they are and help them achieve their business goals with help from the Atlassian tech stack.

These offerings fall into three broad categories:

  • Implementation and Migration
  • Optimization and Integration
  • Coaching and Training

Implementation and Migration

Whether a customer is already established in the Atlassian ecosystem, or they’re just getting started, our implementation experts can help them choose the best solution set and set it up for success. This can involve:

Optimization and Integration

One of the most powerful qualities of the Atlassian tool stack is its flexibility. The core applications are useful out of the box, but they become a thousand times more powerful when customized, optimized, and integrated into the business’s workflows. We can help with that too, including:

  • Solution “health reports” to diagnose and start treating issues
  • Custom Atlassian integrations to incorporate automation and data sharing
  • Optimized third-party integrations via our stable of over 30 partner apps to connect Atlassian to the rest of your business
  • Custom development to extend Atlassian applications
  • Ongoing technical support, either as needed or on a subscription basis

Coaching and Training

Of course, all that technological power means little if the users are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the Atlassian applications. That’s why our team of over 50 certified Atlassian experts provide:

Work with a Partner of the Year to implement and optimize your tools, and train you to get the most out of your Atlassian investment. Speak to an expert today.

We’re Growing Again! Help Us Welcome Elabor8 to the Cprime Family

Posted on April 18, 2023 by - Company News

We’re Growing Again! Help Us Welcome Elabor8 to the Cprime FamilyWe’re thrilled to announce that Cprime has acquired Elabor8, a leading provider of digital transformation, agility, and technology solutions based in Australia. Read the official press release here.

Elabor8 has traveled a similar trajectory to our own, with over a decade of rapid growth and the development of a stellar reputation across Australia and the APAC region. By joining forces, we become greater than the sum of our parts, opening up greater global scope in which to spotlight the wealth of experience and expertise across both companies. 

Who is Elabor8?

In their own words:

Elabor8 was recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in Australia, winning a place on the AFR Fast 100 list six years in a row—a significant achievement for a privately owned startup.

We now work with over 25% of the ASX50 while continuing to serve some of Australia’s most dynamic organizations, companies that will become the next generation of corporate heavyweights. We’re proud to be helping leaders build the cultural mindset to achieve real change. Together, we’re providing people and teams with the freedom they need to deliver true value to customers.

All 140+ professionals in the organization focus their efforts on various aspects of strategic organizational transformation, including:

  • Operating model
  • Organizational design
  • Ways of working transformation
  • Operational excellence
  • Digital transformation

Delivering these services, the Elabor8 team have become well known for helping their clients pursue enterprise agility through consulting, training, and coaching services that empower them to effect lasting change.

Our CEO, Zubin Irani, notes the synergy this creates: “Elabor8 brings a world-class team of professionals with the same level of focus and dedication to delivering client success that we strive for every day at Cprime.”

Like Cprime, Elabor8 saw the value of forging strategic partnerships with technology and methodology solution providers like Atlassian, Scaled Agile, and AWS. By leveraging these and other existing partnerships, our newly expanded global team of experts will be able to add that much more value to our client interactions.

Paul Velonis, CEO of Elabor8, confirms this: “Becoming part of a global consultancy like Cprime allows us to provide a comprehensive international strategy for our clients as we support them in becoming more responsive to their markets, customers and competitive changes. This is an exciting opportunity for both companies that will allow us to combine our expertise and experience for the benefit of our clients around the world.”

We’re excited to embark on this newest phase in Cprime’s history, and to welcome the talented Elabor8 team into our family!

Gitlab Integrations: Popular Synchronization to Simplify Software Development

Posted on April 13, 2023 by - Data, Integration & Governance

GitLab integrations make collaboration more convenient and productive. Working on a project often requires the use of several tools and applications for different aspects of the workflow. But jumping from one tab to another is frustrating and an opportunity to miss important information. That’s why the goal of GitLab integrations is to connect the tools enterprise teams use and simplify how they collaborate.

What is GitLab?

GitLab is a web-based git repository that provides open and private repositories, issue-following capabilities, and wikis. It is a complete DevOps platform that enables professionals to perform all the tasks in a project—from project planning and source code management to monitoring and security. It allows teams to collaborate and build better software.

GitLab helps teams reduce product lifecycles and increase productivity, which ‌creates value for customers. The application doesn’t require users to manage authorizations for each tool. Once permissions are set, everyone in the organization has access to every component.

Fast and easy GitLab integrations: What are they for?

Gitlab Integrations: Popular Synchronization to Simplify Software DevelopmentGitLab offers a wide assortment of plugins and integrations, allowing you to extend and enhance its already impressive functionality. These integrations leverage the overall functionality of the ecosystem and improve the development workflow, making the development team’s work easier and faster.

Using GitLab integrations can help you meet commitments and compliance requirements more easily, while reducing your reliance on manual communication to update cross-functional teams.

Top 10 popular GitLab integrations

  1. GitLab Jira Integration
  2. GitLab Slack Integration
  3. GitLab Jenkins Integration
  4. GitLab Teams Integration
  5. GitLab GitHub Integration
  6. GitLab SonarQube Integration
  7. GitLab Trello Integration
  8. GitLab Asana Integration
  9. GitLab Confluence Integration
  10. GitLab Snyk Integration

GitLab Jira integration

Jira is a software application by Atlassian used for issue tracking and project management. Thousands of Agile development teams use the tool to track bugs, stories, epics, and more. It is a perfect tool for teams to create, track, and prioritize tasks. Originally designed as a bug and issue tracker, Jira has evolved to manage software development, Agile project management, bug tracking, scrum management, content management, marketing, professional service management and so much more.

The Jira GitLab integration lets your development team follow the progress of issues through the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) process without leaving Jira. Meanwhile, DevOps practitioners receive real-time updates on Jira issues without leaving GitLab. These features can save time and effort while improving transparency across the development, testing, and deployment workflow.

But, for many organizations, several beneficial features are lacking in the native GitLab integration with Jira because every business is unique, and out-of-the-box tools may not meet every need. Sometimes a custom Jira GitLab integration is a better fit.

GitLab Slack integration

Slack is a messaging program designed to help team members work more efficiently by allowing them to communicate, collaborate, share files, and assign tasks.

With a GitLab Slack integrations, the team can automatically receive real-time updates in Slack whenever something changes in your GitLab repositories. This keeps your team up to date with what is happening with GitLab and proposed coding changes. You can also issue a command in Slack that takes effect in GitLab.

GitLab Jenkins integration

Gitlab Integrations: Popular Synchronization to Simplify Software DevelopmentJenkins is an open-source software development platform enriched with continuous integration (CI) and other DevOps automation capabilities. Organizations use Jenkins to build and deploy applications and integrate with GitLab or other DevOps tools.

A Jenkins GitLab integration allows you to build and deploy an application on Jenkins and reflect the output on the GitLab user interface more conveniently. Combining these tools lets you trigger a Jenkins build when the team pushes code to a repository or creates a merge request.

For example, you may implement a GitLab Jenkins integration if you intend to migrate your CI from Jenkins to GitLab CI/CD in the future. Or you may need a temporary solution when you invest in Jenkins Plugins and continue using Jenkins to create your apps.

GitLab Teams integration

Microsoft Teams is a popular Slack alternative—a hub for teamwork, productivity, and collaboration. It brings together your chat, meetings, notes, people, and tools in one place.

A Teams GitLab integration displays notifications about GitLab projects in Microsoft Teams to keep the team informed and engaged. It is easy to implement and helps workflows run smoothly, triggering workflows automatically as updates occur.

With GitLab Microsoft Teams integrations you can automate redundant manual tasks and save precious time and effort, orchestrate your business process by integrating the apps you use efficiently, and move data seamlessly.

GitLab GitHub integration

Both GitHub and GitLab are great ways to host your git repositories online. Both offer powerful tools to manage your open source or private code projects.

The major difference between GitHub and GitLab is the platform each presents. GitHub has higher availability and is more focused on infrastructure performance, while GitLab is more focused on offering a features-based system with a centralized, integrated platform for web developers.

So why choose if there is a GitLab and GitHub integration?

  • GitHub repository import makes importing a repository from GitHub super easy.
  • Repository synchronization from Gitlab to Github allows your team to use GitLab as the principal source of information but maintain a GitHub repository. Team members can use GitHub’s issue tracker, wiki, and forum.

GitLab SonarQube integration

We divide code review into two types: manual and automatic review. While an individual tester—a developer or engineer, usually—does manual review, tools or programs perform automatic review. Developers can use a few tools for automatic review, and one of the most popular is SonarQube.

A SonarQube GitLab integration allows you to maintain code quality and security in your GitLab projects. If you integrate GitLab with SonarQube, you can:

  • Sign in to SonarQube with your GitLab credentials.
  • Import your GitLab Projects into SonarQube to set up SonarQube projects easily.
  • Integrate analysis into your build pipeline.
  • See your Quality Gate and code results right in GitLab so you know if it’s safe to merge your changes.

GitLab Trello integration

Gitlab Integrations: Popular Synchronization to Simplify Software DevelopmentThere is a wide range of project management tools available in the market that can simplify the work management process, but Trello stands out among the rest as it offers a straightforward and intuitive approach to organizing and keeping track of all your projects at a glance.

Sometimes a large project might require multiple team members to work simultaneously, and in this case, it’s challenging to keep track of everyone’s contributions to the project. Luckily, GitLab can solve this problem by enabling multiple individuals to work on a single project simultaneously. With the two of these needs coinciding, a Trello GitLab Integration makes sense.

Integrate Trello with GitLab to maximize the output of any project team.

GitLab Asana integration

Asana is a project management tool that helps individuals and businesses manage projects, create and track tasks, assign responsibility, and set timelines.

With an Asana GitLab integration, your work can easily flow across tools and teams. In addition, the integration allows you to sync tasks, issues, projects, Asana custom fields, GitLab labels, comments, assignees, and more to stay on top of your projects and promote collaboration.

Project managers rarely deal with developer platforms, whereas software development teams would rather focus on DevOps than project management tools. The Asana GitLab integration may solve this problem for organizations by syncing both teams seamlessly and automatically. GitLab would instantly reflect any changes or updates made on Asana by the project managers for the developers to take action or note.

GitLab Confluence integration

Confluence is another exceptional supporting tool for developer teams. It is ideally suited for project management, offering an essential single source of truth for developer teams. The platform makes it easy to maintain online documentation, collaborate on content, assign tasks to team members, and manage crucial project deadlines and milestones.

A GitLab Confluence integration simply means linking both platforms so information flows freely from one platform to the other. An action in one medium can automatically trigger a predetermined action on another platform. That way, you don’t have to enter information in both GitLab and Confluence manually.

GitLab Snyk integration

Gitlab Integrations: Popular Synchronization to Simplify Software DevelopmentSnyk is an open source security platform for finding vulnerabilities in the source code of an application. It further provides the severity of vulnerabilities, classifying them as major, minor, or critical, so you can prioritize and take suitable action.

Snyk integrates with developer tools and workflows to continuously find and automatically fix vulnerabilities, so you can ensure security at scale without affecting velocity. A Snyk GitLab integration is helpful to create intelligent security bots which can efficiently create secure environments for future deployments.

The GitLab Snyk integration can help you:

  1. See Snyk tests that check for vulnerabilities in your pull requests.
  2. Get alerts with fixes when new vulnerabilities are disclosed.
  3. Get alerts if a new upgrade is available for a vulnerability that affects you.

Our case

About 70 percent of digital transformations fail because of complexity, bottlenecks and inefficient use of management tools. Businesses that require custom GitLab integration might struggle with the transformation process, but there are a few common issues.

Cprime brought together GitLab and Jira in a custom integration solution for one of our clients to speed up the software delivery process and meet organizational business objectives faster. As a result, the unique integration allowed the client to:

  • Access Jira Board View inside GitLab to keep them from jumping around
  • Pass Build information from GitLab to Jira
  • Display GitLab Deployment info inside Jira
  • Create Jira Issues from unresolved merge request threads
  • Create Jira Issues from GitLab
  • Create a GitLab branch from a Jira Issue
  • Display feature flag info
  • Add comment integrations

Cprime is ready to help you build a custom GitLab solution to get the most out of your tooling stack. If you are ready to integrate your business tools with GitLab in a custom solution, or your out-of-the-box solution needs to be fine-tuned, speak to an integration expert today.

What is ESM? Understanding Enterprise Service Management for Your Business

Posted on April 6, 2023 by - Service Management

According to the Service Desk Institute, 68% of organizations had implemented Enterprise Service Management (ESM) strategies as of mid-2021—a 58% increase from two years prior. But what is ESM? And should it matter to you and your business?

This post explores the concept of Enterprise Service Management and the core elements necessary for ESM success. As you read, it’s important to remember there’s no one-size-fits-all solution—businesses should tailor ESM to their unique business needs.

This article is an excerpt from our free white paper, Your Practical Guide to Enterprise Service Management. Download it now to dive deeper.

What Is ESM (Enterprise Service Management)?

What is ESM? Understanding Enterprise Service Management for Your BusinessESM stands for Enterprise Service Management and is often defined as “the use of ITSM (IT Service Management) principles to support all business functions across the enterprise.” However, we disagree with the limitations inherent in that definition.

ESM is not an offshoot of ITSM; the two are very different in both their approach and their  desired outcomes.

It is common for IT organizations to have established ITSM processes in place that may serve as a launching point for ESM in the broader organization. However, it’s challenging to apply IT’s relatively complex processes, tool components, and governance requirements to all business units. Team members in Marketing, HR, Finance, and other groups may become overwhelmed by changes, leading to lower ESM adoption rates and failed initiatives.

Therefore, a more appropriate definition of Enterprise Service Management is:

An optimized combination of the right software solutions, well-thought-out processes and workflows, and customized automation that effectively supports a customer-centric approach to each service an internal business unit undertakes.

In some cases, certain aspects of an existing ITSM solution may carry over to the larger ESM program, but only if it fully supports and translates to each business unit’s goals and limitations.

Before analyzing and developing any solutions, it’s beneficial for an organization to consult with a partner experienced in successfully delivering ESM.

ESM Puts the Customer First

It’s important to recognize that a successful adoption of Enterprise Service Management requires each of the organization’s business units to change their views about what they do and who they do it for.

To support streamlined workflows and processes that are truly customer-centric, the team’s culture must emphasize providing the very best service to each customer in an efficient manner and they should optimize the following concepts:

  • Services – Internal business units must view the services and related deliverables they produce as products, just as the company has concrete products and services they sell to external customers.
  • Customers – An ESM team’s customers include individuals, business units, vendors, and other stakeholders that benefit from the services the teams provide.
  • Value Stream – The ESM value stream includes every interaction that takes place between a customer’s request and the delivery of value to that customer. This may include one individual’s activity or the collaboration of multiple departments.

The Core Elements of an ESM Solution

What is ESM? Understanding Enterprise Service Management for Your BusinessAn optimal ESM program includes some combination of the following five core elements:

1. Portal

A centralized portal is the software hub for any ESM program. The portal facilitates service requests, manages ongoing service tasks, and maintains appropriate governance throughout the service lifecycle.

An optimal ESM solution will allow for customized entry points for each business unit, tailored to their customers’ specific needs.

Some examples of popular solutions successfully used as ESM portals are:

  • Atlassian Jira Service Management
  • Freshworks Freshservice
  • Ivanti ESM
  • ServiceNow ESM
  • BMC Helix
  • IFS Assyst

An effective Enterprise Service Management portal solution must include:

  • Request intake available to all internal customers. A user-friendly interface should provide all the necessary actionable information without complicating requests. Similarly, a multi-channel approach will allow users to submit requests via email, messaging apps, chat programs, and more.
  • A ticketing function that makes each incoming service request its own unit that can be assigned, managed, and closed. It must store all applicable information regarding a ticket’s tasks and status.
  • Basic automation functionality such as chatbots, automatic ticket routing, and workflows that trigger necessary notifications, assignments, and reporting based on a given ticket.
  • Reporting and governance capabilities such as status reports, open and closed ticket tracking, and archival resources.

2. Workflow

In this context, a workflow is any predetermined path through which a service request passes. It includes task completion, notification of appropriate stakeholders, and the production of any necessary governance or reports.

While workflows can be completely manual, an effective ESM workflow will include as much  automation as possible while maintaining optimal control over service activities.

Explore how AI-powered service management can take ESM automation and efficiency to a whole new level!

3. Service Catalog

An ESM service catalog is a universal list of services that can be requested through various internal teams. By employing naming conventions and referring to supporting database material, requests can follow a preset workflow, streamlining the request and fulfillment process.

4. Permissions, Approvals, and Notifications

The ESM system should support user permissions based on the needs and security limitations imposed on various business units and request types. A common use case is HR requests being only visible to HR teams.

Approval capabilities can empower or prevent users from taking certain actions. For example, if a given service must be approved by management before work can begin, the ticket can be automatically assigned to that manager. No one else will be able to manually move the ticket to the next step.

The system should also send notifications via email, messaging program, or some other agreed-upon means to keep stakeholders apprised of a ticket’s status or any necessary assigned action.

5. Reporting

What is ESM? Understanding Enterprise Service Management for Your BusinessA successful ESM solution must incorporate reporting that is robust enough to monitor both current and historical requests. Ideally, the team will use this reporting to routinely inspect the ESM practice and support continual improvement.

Additionally, In highly regulated industries or any organization beholden to compliance regulations, reporting must meet the necessary standards to support auditability.

There is No One-size-fits-all ESM Program

It’s important to recognize that an Enterprise Service Management program does not need to include all of the elements listed above. Nor does every feature included in a given ESM portal solution need to be leveraged for the program to be successful.

Rather, each business unit should review all the available options and determine which core  elements are necessary to fulfill their needs and the needs of the other business units that  depend on them.

A successful program will be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

ESM Implementation for Success

As an organization grows, so does the complexity of its teams and business units. To maintain smooth operations and provide stellar customer service, your organization may need to implement a software solution that enables ESM.

This article is an excerpt from our free white paper, Your Practical Guide to Enterprise Service Management. Download it now to dive deeper.