Agile Experience Report: Transition and Complexity at Cisco Voice Technology Group

The authors spent six month in the center of the roll-out of agile practices in the Cisco Voice Technology organization. The roll-out started earlier, and is continuing after this period, and many more people contributed to the implementation. We learned that following an organizational change pattern (we used Kotter's eight step process ) is helpful to structure the program, and made us aware of where we were, and what needed doing first. We found some issues, and while working on this paper discovered that others have found similar patterns, most notably Linda Rising in her book "Fearless Change". Obstacles we found include the necessity to obtain and maintain support of leadership, the influence of tooling on the implementation, and the need to go step-by-step: get agile skills in teams before attempting to change the full Software Development Life Cycle. We had great results from made-to-measure training of the teams around the globe, from finding a pace-maker process in the development process, and from the support of people who lead actual development programs.