Abstract:

• Does your organisation treat I.T. like a factory, taking orders from “the business”?
• Does your funding and approval process force you to work in large batches with commitment to fixed time, budget and scope?
• Do your KPIs lead people to optimise for their role or department?
• Do your legacy applications limit how fast your organisation can innovate?
• Is your fuzzy front end full of queues, analysis paralysis and fighting for approval?

If you want to hear about how Maersk Line, the world’s largest container shipping company wrestled with and changed each of these, this session is for you!

Our journey starts with a revolutionary approach: A $60m mega-project to deliver a new customer facing website. Set up as a “startup” within the company, we attempted to implement and scale Scrum. You’ll learn what worked, what didn’t and what we learned along the way – and how it was ultimately seen as a huge failure in the eyes of senior management.

We then pivoted to take a more evolutionary approach. This time by tailoring and adapting a set of Lean-Agile practices that would fit our context and culture – and mostly focused on increasing end-to-end speed. We studied the whole system and selected 8 Lean-Agile practices that could scale up to the enterprise level and across the whole portfolio:

Learning Outcomes:

The challenges of driving change in a Fortune 500 behemoth

How focusing on changing the whole end-to-end value-stream helped to reduce cycle time (and how that also hindered us).

How important changing the funding model was

How to argue for changing KPIs that damage the whole

How to “Do Agile” and make massive improvements in cycletime *without* any changes in downstream practices like automated testing and continuous delivery.

How we changed the common perception that Agile is for Greenfields only