Transitioning from Agile Development to Enterprise Product Management Agility

Abstract

By now, your company has made the transition to Scrum. "Sprints", "backlogs", and "retrospectives" are everyday words, but you have discovered the complications that arise within Product Management. Product Owners and Managers who have been scattered across multiple teams are no longer in sync, and at the senior management level, there is not very much visibility into what the Scrum teams are working on unless backlogs are scrutinized. Even then, it is difficult to connect the user stories to management’s high level goals. In addition, cross-product dependencies are not being effectively recognized and managed. The necessity of tracing high level business objectives and portfolio initiatives down to the user story level is essential to any high performing agile development organization. This experience report details how Ultimate Software has successfully transitioned from agile development to an agile enterprise.