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good morning and welcome everyone thank you for joining us today my name is Karen Stiles and I'm pleased to be a hostess for today's webinar we've been delivering our monthly web occations to you since 2007 and was very happy to see so many returning gifts back with us for today's presentation today we're pleased to have mark Millman solutions development and support with the United States Postal Service with us Mark's presentation is titled main solutions agile transformation at the United States Postal Service you can depend on the directly from the link in the chat box or from our website at www.att.com/biz flash webinar - archives will be tweeted during this presentation if you'd like to join in please use hashtag asked ITSM we've got a few polling questions to help mark learn more about today's listeners so let's start with the first poll that we have today and the work folders how do you major IT application development projects there in your company always on time on budget with time reading for quality challenge due to time delays budget overruns or functionality concern frequently unsuccessful cancelled will put on hold or other speed make your collection okay well mark we have a runaway with 79 percent challenge due to time delays budget overruns and functionality concern followed by 14% frequently unsuccessful cancels or put on hold at 7% other and we have a zero on always on time on budget and with high ratings for quality okay our next polling question how experienced are you with agile development methodologies another all experience initial learning with adoption on small projects perhaps you're gaining increased experience and knowledge new projects highly experienced on small medium and large projects or other speed make your selections in during the presentation the information that mark presents may raise some questions or you might be looking for some additional clarification or information we've scheduled his time at the end of today's session to answer your questions so to submit your questions just use the chat window that appears in the GoToWebinar control panel which is located in the upper right corner of your screen open your trap window by clicking on the plus sign next to the word chat and just type your question in the chat log section and click the send button please feel free to submit your questions at any time during the presentation since there's a large number of attendees for the session and Mark has a lot of information to share with us deliver as many questions as possible today and as always we'll compile all of the question and answers in a Q&A report and email you the link to download the report in a few days ok we're gonna close this poll and we have on this one mark we have been 42 percent meaning increased experience and knowledge through projects we've got 29% initial learning with adoption on small project followed by 18% not at all experienced 8% highly experienced of small medium and large projects and a 3 percent other on that and our next poll is your company's maturation level with agile developments what is that is no experience at all with the company limited early experience exploring on a few projects currently implementing an organization-wide agile standards significant experience and maturity with agile or other please make your selection we have a couple sections a little bit close here mark with this week for a couple of minutes and then see okay finished making your selection and we're going to be closing the bowl okay okay mark we have 51 percent currently implementing an organization-wide agile standard 28 percent limited early experience exploring on a few projects and we have a tie at 9% on no experience at all and significant experience and maturity with agile thank you so much for that and our last poll has the use of a girl change project success in your organization are you not using at them minor improvements in delivery and success metrics some improvements in delivery and success metrics or significant improvement in delivery and success methods or other please make your selection again we've got a couple of close ones here Mon okay finished making a selection we're gonna be closing the hole okay thank you and then mark we have 34% some improvement in delivery and success metrics 23% significant improvement in delivery and success method and we have a tie with a 60% not using agile and 16% minor improvements for delivery and success metrics so I want to thank you all for sharing that information with mark to give him a better sense of our audience today thank you so much so those of you new to ITSM Academy starts a quick overview I anticipation we've trained tens of thousands of students on site across the Americas and in our public training centers in Fort Lauderdale Dallas Minneapolis Phoenix Reston Salt Lake City and Tampa as well as in our virtual classrooms now let's introduce today's speaker Marc Medellin Marc is a senior information technology leader for the United States Postal Service who has over 30 years of technology and business experience Marc is primarily responsible for managing for large IT solution development sensors that create innovative technology solutions criticals and business operations Marc is also responsible for development of the enterprise data warehouse solutions architecture and application testing functions in Marc's role he is also a strategic business partner who is responsible for working with the business units and leveraging the appropriate technology solutions in transforming the USPS business Marc join the USPS in 2006 and has held multiple positions within the information technology organization prides are we seeing all development and support for over 600 systems across the enterprise under his leadership the USPS IT development organization has transformed itself to become more agile and responsive in delivering solutions leveraging new technologies in short intervals more quickly realized business value when such transformation is the ongoing implementation of agile at the enterprise level increasingly increasing project transparency improving quality and validating early and often with postal business partners that the solutions need to find objectives mark has personally fostered and guided innovation and increased business efficiency through the implementation of agile from from bond agile engineering software tools mobile solutions and service-oriented architecture to measure and increase productivity while the same time changing the development culture to one where management and staff can openly communicate ideas and issues prior to joining the USPS mark held a number of senior IT leadership positions in the private sector with companies delivering and to press software solutions to the federal center last serving as vice president of supply chain management solutions at General Dynamics good morning mark good morning Karen good morning everybody I'm very excited to speak to you about our experience implementing the agile methodology at the Postal Service I believe there will be plenty of time at the end for any questions I must say I'm not terribly surprised that the results of the polling questions and I appreciate everybody taking time to fill those out just to sort of recap what I heard zero percent are claiming always on time on budget and with high ratings for quality that perhaps is a slightly lower number than I might have expected but the 79 percent challenged and 14 percent unsuccessful is in alignment with things that I've generally seen in industry it looks like approximately 79 percent of all of you on the line are involved in agile in some way either from an initial learning perspective to highly experienced but the bulk of it being gaining experience sounds like from a company maturation level we've got approximately 50 plus percent currently implementing agile on an organizational wide standard that's actually wonderful to hear and lastly has has the use of agile changed project success in your organization sounds like 57% if I'm doing my math correctly see somewhere between some improvements and significant improvement and I suspect that's a reflection of where people are on the maturation curve that the more mature all of you become in your organizations with agile as well as the thing with us here at postal the greater that benefit will be there's a Chantal as Karen mentioned my name is Mark Mittleman and I'm the postal executive in charge of solution development and support we currently perform development out of Ford geographically dispersed solution centers located in st. Louis San Mateo California wilkes-barre Pennsylvania and Eagan Minnesota as well as the Washington DC metropolitan area yes solutions development supports over 900 applications and has a development organization of 500 plus employees additional contractors and condemn going research and development of technical solutions for the future yeah we are here some remark thank you Karen I should have said that at the beginning thank you as I was saying solutions development supports over 900 applications has a development organization of 500 plus employees with additional contractor staff and also conducts ongoing research and development of technical solutions for the future the bulk of my 30 plus years is in the area of large-scale software development and software development methodologies and Karen it does not look like on my screen this 40 no I don't see it forwarding at mark okay give me a second nice graphics though any idea Karen I don't you're in presentation mode I am and I'm seeing the title screen I'm seeing the title screen also bear with me folks okay there we go sorry about that looking at the agenda today we're going to cover a range of topics related to agile first I'll briefly talk about the growing trend in industry for software projects given what's going on in industry I'll also give you a high-level overview of the postal technology and business environments the meat of the discussion I'm going to lead will cover three areas are overall a agile program specifically our implementation of scrum agile engineering and lastly our recent implementation of the scaled agile framework also known as safe next we'll move into a retrospective examining lessons learned the benefits we've realized through the program and discuss some of our challenges finally I'll wrap up with a discussion of how we stack up against industry and look at where the Postal Service is heading next with the agile program there are no shortage of statistics with an industry that outlined the success and failure rates for software development projects and I think our polling questions also showed that as well anecdotally just by looking at the chart I'm certain you can guess the meaning behind the numbers we've all seen it Green is good red is bad and yellow is our nice way of saying something is going bad to set the stage for the discussion of the yellow and red areas in June of 2012 respondents to a Gartner survey identified six frequently cited causes for project failure cost variance late delivery functionality issues quality concerns cancellation prior to launch an application not used or cancelled after launch so let's look at what these numbers really mean industry-wide according to a 2012 Kaos report on the state of software development projects 43% of the projects were challenged as shown in the yellow within that 43% a whopping 74% had significant schedule overruns also within that 43% 59 percent nearly 3/5 had significant cost overruns not a good picture 18% of projects as shown in red or either canceled prior to implementation or never resulted in significant use leading to eventual cancellation the combination of yellow and red shows over 60% of project implementations have serious issues now let's talk about the green area while 39 percent of the projects were successful even within that number there is cause for concern within that 39 percent only 20 percent of the features were used post implementation while 50 percent of the features were hardly ever used contributing to the schedule and cost creep increasing total cost of ownership and reducing overall return on investment given posts those large enterprise requirements vast volumes of data and transactions and general complexity these statistics tend to reflect our reality at times we recognize that new strategy for success was needed now that we've looked at what's trending in industry I want to talk specifically about the postal service everything that the Postal Service is big including our infrastructure data volumes and data processing requirements as a very large enterprise we have one of the largest computing infrastructures in the world supported by 1200 plus IT employees and a sizeable contractor community IT is responsible for nearly 900 applications maintained at the four geographically disbursed centers that I already mentioned we have 40,000 plus facilities 38,000 post offices a hundred fifty thousand computers 13,000 smartphones 45,000 point-of-sale terminals 310,000 handheld scanners and systems that use in-store approximately 33 petabytes of our applications support over 40% of the world's mail volume process over sixty billion in revenue transactions handle 310 million Mail scan events per day operate on an ear 24 by 7 basis and have high availability and high throughput requirements and that's just a handful of our statistics the stakes are high for postal and in this type of environment with complex dynamic business needs and highly integrated systems successful software development is a challenging the critical endeavor like the rest of Industry we've also had some challenges on our IT projects the Postal Service has experienced great change over recent years a significant portion of our employees are retiring or changing jobs both in the business and IT areas in some cases institutional knowledge has significantly decreased from highs of the past decade likewise given the breadth and depth of our enterprise the dynamic needs of our business organizations we can no longer afford long lead times massive requirement initiatives and perfect static business requirements locked in early in the system's lifecycle perfect requirements simply aren't achievable for us we know from experience that our technical teams must be able to adapt to changing business needs unfortunately under the waterfall approach change was generally identified as bad based on the stakes and the cost of failure living with limit transparency on project schedule and cost is simply not acceptable to us like many organizations customers sometimes had little view of the entire development cycle improvements and project delivery and quality were required if not demanded by our management and our customers in addition our business teams needed in one an IT to be a partner provide leadership and help drive the overall business and technology solutions let's talk about the objectives we outlined specifically for the Postal Service agile program we decided to move from the traditional waterfall methodology to an agile methodology based on a core set of objectives identified by management business customers and our technical teams lack of regular communication was often cited as an issue improving communication across and within the business and technical teams throughout the entire systems lifecycle was critical agile drove daily communication and the customer or to use agile terms product owner is deeply involved in the process project management - often centered around complex project plans that were frequently out-of-date shortly after they were published addre agile drove the use of processes and tools providing clear deal clear daily metrics showing quantitative measures what was accomplished what's in progress and which impediments were holding us back agile for us was less planned driven though we still use plans and much more value vision driven with the customers fully engaged project success increase through greater collaboration and feedback in all phases of the work particularly the sprint planning and sprint reviews quality increase through the use of tools and automation in the areas of continuous integration test-driven development automated testing code quality checkers and built in continuous improvement loops and of course speed the market increased through the use of two-week sprints to demonstrate value to the business and improved prioritization of our value streams similarly we try to limit release planning to nothing longer than a quarter prior to that we often did releases either much too fast following a waterfall methodology or six to nine months maybe even a year which was too long to go our agile program scope covers three areas to realize high level objectives that are just outlined those areas are business planning scrum methodology and development and engineering best practices which we've called agile engineering at postal we chose to focus our initial agile implementation on the scrum methodology followed by the implementation of agile engineering and most recently moved into business planning by focusing on the second and third areas as our first two we had greater control in driving the initial change and as we matured we saw there was great benefit to addressing the business planning area there were multiple development approaches under the agile umbrella ranging from Kanban to feature driven development to extreme programming all of these can work well when properly followed we chose scrum and scrum bond arguably two of the most widely used approaches for development and maintenance initiatives scrum provides an iterative and incremental framework for managing product development note the emphasis on product versus project scrum defines a flexible holistic product development strategy where development teams work as a unit to reach a common goal it challenges assumptions found in the traditional sequential approaches to projects and enables teams to self organize by encouraging colocation and online collaboration of all team members this includes daily face-to-face communication among all team members a guiding principle of scrum is that customers can change their minds about what they want need and change is healthy and not viewed as a negative metric for our maintenance efforts we implemented scrum bond scrum bond is a combination of scrum and Kanban generally meant for more unpredictable work environments where plans and requirements can change often scrum bond offers flexible project management and is focused more on production support and smaller scaled maintenance for us it was also we had been paid just to spin our teams up with scrum bond because we could get many more people involved and that was a good precursor to getting them involved in scrum engineering best practices drove us to implement automation around continuous integration test driven development automated testing and the use of multiple tools for code quality management this reduces manual labor through automated processes reduce a technical debt and drive substantial increases in overall quality more recently we began focusing on business planning helping our customers in the early business and product planning instead of waiting for huge requirements to be dumped on teams after months of business analysis for our largest products we have started implementation of the scaled agile framework I'll address all three of these areas in the next slides now let's walk through the agile scrum process flow we use a postal what you'll see is that the scrum stresses business partner collaboration iterative and incremental development and daily project transparency first let me define a couple terms product owners are business stakeholders key users and decision-makers scrum master is the coach facilitator and the scrum process owner walking through the diagram left to right once a vision is created by the product owner the team comprised of product owners the scrum master team members and other stakeholders creates the product roadmap and product backlog of requirements this backlog is prioritized and evaluated for opportunities to implement chunks early so business value is realized faster the team then conducts release planning story reviews and sprint planning where requirements are composed in the stories with acceptance criteria defined upfront those user stories or assigned story points prioritize and assigned to specific releases and two-week sprints at the Postal Service the product is developed into experience by self organized teams each sprint daily 15 minutes stand up meeting after each sprint daily 15 minutes stand-up meetings are held with the entire team to review accomplishments next steps and look at impediments product reviews are completed at the end of each sprint during these reviews business owners plan and review workable code to eliminate surprises sprint and release retrospectives are performed to draw continuous improvement with everyone involved are documented in our version one tool which we use for agile management and has an agile support tool at postal we still perform end-to-end systems integration and end-to-end customer acceptance testing but the timeframe is greatly reduced as many tests are prepared automated and conducted during the actual Sprint's okay so that's a lot in describing that diagram and I want to see if I can summarize it just a little bit more here's a lightening round of what scrum framework means product owner creates the product backlog which is a prioritized list of requirements during sprint planning the team pulls small chunks to the top of the Sprint backlog and decides how to implement those pieces the team has a certain amount of time called a two-week sprints to complete its work the full team meets 15 minutes each day to assess its progress known as the daily stand-up meetings through the process the scrum master is facilitating across all the participants keeping the team focused on its goals and ensuring that the scrum process is followed with fidelity at the end of each sprint the work could potentially be usable by a customer though every effort does not result in a two-week production deployment the Sprint ends with a review and wet retrospective with the entire team and then as the next sprint begins the team chooses another chunk off the product backlog and begins working again that's the lightening round for the agile process flow the Postal Service has for a long time maintained a strong commitment to Lean Six Sigma processes the adoption of the agile methodology by IT complements the emphasis on lean practices the diagram in the upper right depicts that there is an explicit link from customers to processes to execution which is necessary to ensure the organization is aligned with the changing needs of the business both lean and agile focus on eliminating waste and rework small batches shorter cycle times delivering and improving value for the business and of course continuous improvement in keeping with lean agile emphasizes self-organizing teams teamwork and collaboration particularly between the business and IT highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software agile also focuses on reducing risk through iterative development and incremental deliverables delivering highest priority items first increasing business partner satisfaction through frequent delivery continuous alignment and refinement of delivered products to business needs project management based on quantitative trends business changes are welcomed documented and assessed immediately transparency of the project progress issues and resource usage and of course productivity increases also agile fits in well with some of our newer principles here at postal which we like to call fail they fail fast and good not perfect we applied these principles primarily to new innovation and new product delivery or proof-of-concept efforts that we do now let's look at the postal agile roadmap that we followed earlier I spoke to the sheer size and complexity of the postal enterprise this pertains not only to our business needs and infrastructure but also to the sizeable organization structure required to run such a large 24/7 company touching every household in the nation that same size and complexity also extends to the numerous business functions supported by the IT development organizations at the start we envisioned the initial rollout in institutionalization of the agile program would take three years however our depth and breadth have driven us to a slightly longer but perhaps more realistic timeline during the first three years we assess the organization created our roadmap started communications initiated training started key policy revisions began heavy coaching on key programs by year three nearly all projects began using agile and we expanded the agile engineering effort based on the clear value and ROI to be gained from that effort currently in year four and in year five we are extending the program well outside the IT organization while also working to reduce the need for external contractor based coaching by using strong agile trained PMS we are also implementing comprehensive automated testing and fully integrated business planning using the scaled agile framework throughout this journey we learned the importance of sustained coaching and also the need for continuous improvement and assessment of our own program as a high-level enterprise status we've achieved many significant milestones and the implementation of the postal agile program our IT policies and procedures have been updated to reflect the change from waterfall to agile likewise we worked with our Supply Management and business organizations to update policies related to procurements today we've completed 485 agile releases across 224 applications on projects of all sizes and complexities over 1500 staff have been shaped trained in agile scrum engineering and safe nearly 1,700 business and technical users have been trained and are currently using our agile project management and support tool version 1 our metrics are use of metrics continues to expand including product sprint and release burn downs along with resource velocity metrics scorecards to measure agile progress and maturity across the development and business organizations engineering tools to measure automated testing code coverage upward build failure rates and code quality and customer surveys are used to obtain feedback on agile projects early on we have two methodologies in play at postal when we started the agile program we maintained the waterfall methodology while we performed edge proof-of-concept validations evaluated benefits and determine the enterprise rollout strategy however I do want to take a moment and outline the differences we found between our previously used waterfall methodology and the agile scrum methodology we use today if done correctly agile is value driven through feature delivery Waterfall is planned delivery through fixed tasks start dates and end dates agile is more about individuals and interactions Waterfall focuses on tools and processes agile tracks progress by working software and business value delivered waterfall tracks progress against the project plan agile embraces change waterfall often avoids change and frequently views it negatively and negatively agile stresses the importance of defining done 95 percent in a waterfall project implies some type of value whereas an agile done is only measured by a hundred percent completion and lastly normally agile will fund for product completion Waterfall efforts will generally fund for project completion that's when we're still working on here we still do a form of system integration and customer acceptance but they're reduced this allows for final regression testing as well as validating the promotion pass across complex non prod to prod environments there's a governance component the governance is for our compliance as a final check in terms of supporting our Sox initiatives and to ensure documentation is maintained in our lifecycle repository final preparation for release includes validating automated deployments and ensuring notifications to other key business and IT stakeholders such as a helpdesk monitoring teens and others occurs properly transparency is a key principle in the agile methodology without without transparency things go wrong fast project teams lose motivation they don't want to fail that quality suffers if the team's struggle to get something delivered and eventually burnout through pressure to find a way to deliver teams end up feeling hopeless and overcome by technical debt productivity and morale suffer customers then lose faith they rarely get what they want when they needed at the price they agreed to management tries to fill those gaps through micromanagement and message control and stress levels their rise as well we typically project managers at two levels on our agile projects one for management and another for the project team project management project team management employees daily reviews with the agile scrum processes to identify and address issues clarify and validate business requirements and provide true project status bi-weekly or monthly management reviews provide summary information on cost schedule risk and issues by using agile scrum and our agile support software we now have project transparency to view daily progress on progress on project status we still manage the overall project using Microsoft Project is noted in the right top portion of the diagram however significant portions of that project plan or for managing procurements setting up hardware environments tracking the sheer number of sprints and some other non developed developmental tasks we manage the development effort performed during the sprints with version 1 you also see seven commonly used version one reports in this diagram and these are the reports our project managers use when monitoring a project the top left and top mental reports allow you to get a view at the program level with regards to releases implemented or planned as well as the scope across time the middle-left reports show velocity on how much work a team is performing per sprint this is critical for predictability and planning the bottom three reports show the release and sprint burn downs which is progress of the release or the sprint per the plan the bottom right report gives you the ability to drill down into user stories themselves and view status by the team version one has over 70 canned reports but you can also display dashboards and develop your own all of this allows anyone on the project to monitor project status to date we've trained over 400 of our development resources in the agile engineering practices this includes 18 hours of classroom training and four to eight weeks of hands-on coaching many of these courses are outlined on this slide over on the left the training focuses on three areas first continuous integration second test-driven development and third code quality best practices continuous integration is where development teams build test deploy and report their work frequently test-driven development which is incorporated into our definition of done for agile sprints ensures that each new feature has built-in automated tests based on the specifications code quality practices use automated tools typically open source software that are run at selected intervals such as during code check in to validate code quality tools like app scan are currently being configured to perform automated security vulnerability checks you can see a list of some of the common tools that we use over on the right side of the diagram some of the key benefits the USPS has realized from the agile engineering practices are automation of manual error-prone tests with a great ability for reuse improved and accessible code quality checkers making code more reliable efficient secure and maintainable an ability to assess quality for employees and contractors and define standards for performance and lastly strong code quality habits providing ongoing education for our development teams our team has developed now let's talk about the engineering levels with with regard to our agile engineering effort our teams develop these maturity measures for agile engineering based on industry benchmarks across the top of this chart you see for agile engineering levels ranging from training through expert down the left side are the major work streams developed test build deploy and visibility it's important to note several things about this chart first it can be applied at both the team and organization level agile is run by teams and not all teams perform at the same level we discovered several interesting characteristics as we monitor performance against this chart new teams typically dipped in performance but through coaching and perseverance performance eventually improved significantly the longer the team's stay together the more proficient and productive they become lastly we were surprised how quickly some individual staff grew and capability surprisingly often the more junior staff our goal was to get everyone to journeyman this has been a slower process than we initially anticipated primarily due to the time to acquire and setup the engineering capabilities and the newness of some of these constructs to our teams teams that perform at the journeyman level generally participate in peer reviews practice refactoring refactoring for us is changes made to the internal structure of the software so that it's easier to understand and cheaper to maintain without changing the external behavior of that software refactoring for us is not rewriting the code use of automated functional tests static code analysis and improved code coverage automating builds leveraging a CI tool such as Jenkins and using automatic deployment automatic deployments in the lower environments at the very least in development and automating build processes build process output and using reports as input while we have many teams at the journeyman level and a few teams on staff who exceed that we are currently transit transitioning much of the organization from novice level to journeyman level from an engineering perspective I've mentioned the scaled agile framework a couple times so let's talk about that safe is a publicly available framework for applying lean and agile practices at an enterprise scale very important to us given our size if synchronises alignment collaboration and delivery for large numbers of teams across three tiers the portfolio tier defines a centralized strategy epics enterprise architectures and overall budgeting the program tier involves release management project management vision and product roadmaps program epics and release features and the team tier operates under the program vision has scrum teams sprints and value delivery via user stories at its core all three tiers all three tiers and safe focus on program execution alignment which has really roles governance product management coaching and communications code quality and transparency implementation of safe at the Postal Service is particularly important as we have many projects with large teams some exceeding two to three hundred people during critical phases of the life cycle one recent success was our full-service mailing program which during one portion had thirty three concurrence from teams from an industry benchmark perspective safe on large enterprise programs can result in significant benefits increased employee engagement 30 to 75 percent their time to market twenty to fifty percent increase in productivity and fifty percent plus reduction in defects on one postal program change request using safe were reduced by 98% resulting in significant reductions in document eight documentation updates and saving over 2000 labor hours likewise defects encountered in cat and post production release were dressed we reduced we learned a lot throughout our implementation of the agile program agile is not a silver bullet it takes work it exposes impediments but it does not fix them you have to fix them executive management must actively promote and participate in this effort agile is a culture change it's not just about funding you must lead by example agile is fundamentally about discipline that that's a misnomer for many people who think it's very freewheeling in fact the best agile teams display more discipline than most teams especially in the areas of planning testing test driven development continuous integration to test automation your agile projects may not fare well at first this is not unexpected you have to power through that teams take time to form and improve keep your teams together to better monitor progress and get faster results if it's not measured it either isn't done or it won't improve establishing and tracking metrics is key use experienced coaches to drive mentor and facilitate train the change training alone is not enough you must implement agile with fidelity scrum fall the mixture of agile and waterfall will fail likewise teams that modify the agile scrum process and to agile light will also fail regularly communicate and market the agile program progress direction and successes to all levels are participating organizations this is very important to drive awareness and sustain the culture change lastly engage with business owner management and leadership early to get them bought in we did this at the start of individual projects very well but should have done this throughout the entire program to acclimate the business organizations well ahead of their projects besides learning a great deal at postal we've also realized some amazing benefits through agile customer satisfaction has increased resulting from a close partnership with IT and from the delivery of greater value needs prioritized at the top of the list customers have a greater understanding of the value of IT and they understand better how and why changes cannot always be immediately implemented transparency is greatly improved allowing for early identification and resolution of issues and impediments here at postal we have more projects completing on time and within budget always a great indicator is success code quality has increased technical debt is reduced and in particular we have fewer and fewer post implementation issues and lastly and this is an important one team satisfaction and productivity are increasing that's a direct result of self-organizing and self management philosophies embedded into agile not to mention success breeds success increases employee morale at postal we're constantly reassessing our challenges to seek improvement as well according to a recent version one ad general development survey the top areas to agile adoption in descending order our ability to change culture resistance to change availability of personnel with necessary skills consistent management support customer collaboration availability of dedicated resources project complexity or size and perceive time to transition from other methodologies many of these lines directly the challenges we face at the Postal Service and we're actively working on our own continuous improvements as mentioned postal to very large enterprise with complex business and functional needs likewise our development organizations are typically geographically separated from business customers in addition our development teams are a combination of career employees union based employees and contractor teams all of that makes the overall management a little more tricky there's still room for improvement at the Postal Service change is hard and agile is a new way of working with transparency that leaves some uncomfortable until they see the value an establishing is a real habit as I start to wrap up I think it's important to look at how the postal agile program stacks up against the industry Gartner recently published a set of key characteristics for mark modern application development lifecycle management on the left you can see the items enumerated by Gartner including agile methodologies modern tools Enterprise agile project management and a number of DevOps tools since this is the first time I use the term DevOps DevOps is a software development method that stresses communication collaboration integration automation and measurement of cooperation sound familiar on the right are the characteristics of the postal program which are wonderfully in sync with partners views this is a terrific validation of the postal program for us and can serve as a blueprint for other organization in various stages of their own agile program implementation in keeping with our five-year roadmap and postal we're currently focused on expanding edges all scrum scrum bond and engineering processes to all projects including those in and Health side the IT organization expanding the use of agile on non development projects such as infrastructure and telecommunication upgrades and large CIO wide compliance projects such as PCI Sox and security continuation of our measurement and continuous improvement efforts establishing a more formal tie-in of metrics with our IT performance achievement organization which has overall governance responsibilities for all metrics expansion of agile at the business planning level using safe including creating a better tie into our corporate financial funding processes and continuing to drive forward with a more self-sufficient agile program office cautiously transitioning from contractor coaches to prove an internal staff in conclusion I'd like to thank the ITSM Academy and particularly Karen for the opportunity to present postal services status on agile development in addition while I'm the postal executive over the edge I'll program I'd like to take a moment to thank our CIO our vice president of IT John Edgar who's actually spoken for ITSM before my peers and the various IT managers and technical teams at the Postal Service all of whom are the real drivers in making agile a success my email address is also listed on the slide please feel free to email me on any topics I've shared here I'm a firm believer in the importance of networking and helping other organizations I have no doubt that we can also learn from those of you listening in as well and on that note Karen assuming time allows I'll turn it back over to you thank you Mark and thank you so much for doing the webinar for us so we really we're really enjoyed hearing about the US Postal Service because it's something that we all use and so we can relate to so thank you so much that was really very very informative we've got some questions but before we get to them and I just want to remind all of our listeners to chat in your questions if you have any more chop them in now Cora and before we students go to the Q&A I'm going to ask my colleague Erik montijo to eat here to share some information with us hello Erik Erik hi Karen thanks for introducing me can you go yeah how are you doing today I'm well how are you doing I'm doing wonderful hi everyone my name's Eric montijo I am the enrollment specialist here in ITSM Academy so I work with our Alumni building personalized education plans listening to mark speak today really solidified for me how critical process design is for the IT organization specifically one working towards becoming agile CPD supports agile and lean practices by providing a repeatable way to design new and improve existing processes serving as the how-to CPD he also provides a step-by-step approach to managing the organizational culture change associated with any process design or improvement initiative CVD describes proven techniques that can be used to reduce waste and streamline existing processes our next CPD course is March 23rd and it's actually the last time that the course is gonna be will provide 1.5 ITIL credits further though CPD is a core class in our brand new agile path which gives CP de our new agile course certified agile service manager and DevOps Foundation which is the cultural phenomenon taking development and operational management teams by storm I urge you all to take a look at it in our brand new website ITSM academy.com and then send us an email info at ITSM academy.com for more information or if you just like to comment so back to you Karen thank you Eric and one of our listeners asked with CTE stood for and that's certified process design engineer that is correct sorry about that that's okay we get into our own lingo Thank You Erin okay now for those of you that are gonna be dropping off before we start the Q&A I just and I just want to let you know mark we just got a whole lot of questions coming in so this is great but before we start the Q&A just what do you mind everybody that there will not be a March webinar due to all of the school vacations and the spring break our next webinar is scheduled for Thursday April 16th when Nick Wilding head of cyber resilience at Axl's joins us with his presentation titled cyber resilience there is no time to waste and he the presentation revolves around the digital age and how it's providing all organizations with incredible opportunities to innovate and grow but it also has opened up a whole new world of risk and risk to the information that's most critical for our future success so please join us for that on April 16th when we talk about the cyber with ok mark you ready for some question I'll do my best so I have a question for Jerry and he's asking your application timeline seemed extraordinarily long why did it take years to begin implementation well it didn't take years to start our first implementations but it was a significant effort to train our staff and to really ingrain the agile process into our methodologies we had so for so long actually very well defined methodologies and processes around software development that we needed to change all of our documentation educate our people remember our development organizations are dispersed around the country so getting the word out was not simple we did a lot of early proof-of-concept we actually focused it on one development center in particular just to start with so while the timeline is long it's a timeline for a full Enterprise complete adoption the initial rollouts to actually get us started in agile went fairly quickly with some success and some difficulty because as I mentioned what you find initially is that just because you've gone agile on day one doesn't mean everything is better thank you Mark Greg is asking version 1 is a project on it's a project management tool is this question and that came about when you were on the transparency slide well we're still using Microsoft Project for significant portions of the project management as I discussed but version one is really an agile management tool it does many many things it tracks the sprints it does all of the charting that I walked through on that transparency slide version one is specifically geared to the agile processes there's there's a couple major tools out there version one has one rally has one we evaluated several and ended up centering on version one but it's not your standard Microsoft project management it's specifically geared to the agile process okay thank you nina is asking do you have it change record per sprint or other group together in one change record to be released in production at a defined time when we actually do our implementation into production we do create a change record but no because our sprint process is pre-production we're not creating change records for each of those I will say that at the Postal Service we do have a very formal and well-thought-out change process so we we probably better than your average organization handle those types of changes but no it's not necessary as you go through the Sprint's to create a change record at least not in my opinion okay thank you I have a question from Rose I'm sorry I have a question from Dahlia how does change management fit into this agile process is a change Advisory Board gathered to review and approve an application release after it has issued me after a head has been after the past automated testing and before it gets to release management to be deployed so we pry yes the answer is yes just as we did under waterfall we do we do maintain change management boards the change management boards are focused on scope cost and schedule changes in that example where I talked about a 90 percent or 98 production and 98 percent reduction and change request which was on one of our very very large enterprise projects what I'm talking about there is in the past under waterfall every one of those changes had to go through a very lengthy process even though we knew they would eventually be implemented as a part of that release during the agile sprint process we would find that problem immediately correct it noted in the sprint noted in version 1 completely documented but we saved thousands of hours and the way we handled that but we do still formally do convene a change control board for both scope cost and schedule changes thank you Mark and then I'm Greg is asking how well does your agile process aligned with PMBOK with project management and hey mark I'm sorry carrying your immune I think it aligns quite well in fact through the leadership of our performance achievement organization we have trained the bulk of our organization in project management and most of our organization has obtained PMP we're now in the process of starting to go back and get the agile versions of those certifications but project management still very much applause and I've got a couple more questions for you but I also have a couple of comments for you excuse me Greg had said DevOps equals what they should have been doing all along which is where we all know that right DevOps is what we should be doing all along great and then and Rose didn't have a comment for you as well and she said thank you for your time awesome presentation excellent use of my time and I have several of those what a great presentation this was so thank you for that as well Graham I appreciate you say yes and what would you say is the most the biggest difference that you've seen going from waterfall to a job Wow I'm trying to boil that down until one item might be a little bit difficulty I will say it's a different way of working with the teams having self-organized and self-motivated teams is a very different way of working and trusting the other thing I would say is agile drives necessitates whatever the right word is the commitment and collaboration with the customer if you're not getting that yeah absolutely are going to struggle in implementing agile now the good news is agile is going to expose that right out of the gate too often under waterfall and we've been guilty of it too we attempt to move the project forward with a verbal commitment from the customer but without their commitment in action agile shows you right away whether you're getting that or not okay thank you so much and thank you thank you again mark I mean it's just really been a pleasure working with you to pull this presentation together and have you come and join us and present and and there's just so many accolades that people are chatting and I just can't tell you that's all the precedents that we have for today and just to let you know this you know marks the practitioner so he implemented this and so a lot of you will ask us for these types of presentations because you like to hear from the practitioner and you like to see what's working and what's not working and we're going to continue to bring your practitioner presentations such as this discussing agile and IT Service Management implementations and challenges as well people want to hear this so if you would like to share your implementations experiences or challenges on our webinar just let us know I'll be happy to work with you to have you come and present with us as well and once again just a reminder that there will not be a March webinar due to the school vacations and spring breaks but our next webinar will be April 16th in April 16th we're going to have Nick Wilding here and he's going to talk to us about cyber resilience so we hope that you can all join us for that and I want to thank you all for joining us today I want to thank you again mark for presenting such a great presentation for us today and everybody have a great rest of the day thank you Karen you've been wonderful to work with I appreciate all your help thank you my pleasure thank you everybody