Reducing the feature delivery time of a set of codependent Agile teams (evidence)

In 2013 we performed an experiment at a large multinational institute to reduce the feature delivery time of a set of codependent Agile teams. We achieved a significant reduction by deploying five carefully designed improvements. With the improvements we reduced the feature delivery time from 29 days to 10 days.

Collaboration between Scrum teams
People working with Agile teams knows that collaboration between teams can be extremely challenging. Agile tend focusing on their list with work items. Agile teams therefore tend looking inward, 'disconnecting' themselves from the outside world. Such disconnection is counterproductive in case an Agile team cannot deliver added value independently. In that case Agile teams need to collaborate with their interdependent 'peers'.

All expertise in one Agile team
Some argue that all expertise should be positioned in one Agile team. In theory this sounds nice and can hardly be argued against, since this is one of the key-principles of Scrum. In practice however many organizations have legacy IT landscapes with many Commercial-of-the-Self packages. These landscapes are unfortunately too complicated to be handled by one Agile team. Many organizations therefore have to find ways to engage collaboration between Agile teams.

How to achieve proper collaboration?
We developed a set of carefully designed improvement actions. Each improvement action engages the collaboration between codependent Agile teams.

Achieved reduction
With the improvements we reduced the feature delivery time from 29 days to 10 days. The figure shows for each of the codependent Agile teams the decreasing trend of the delivery of feature related stories.

Publication and next steps
The results have been written down in a journal paper. Since we have submitted the paper to a scientific Journal I cannot share all details via het net yet. As next step we want to develop a Scrum Chain Framework for managing sets of codependent Agile teams. Feel free to contact me for more information.