Jeppe Jelsbech Knudsen, Production Manager

Web: www.forbrugerliv.dk

Head Office: Copenhagen, Denmark

Team size: 4 IT specialists

Ciklum service: Own Team & CSC Consulting

Technologies: C#, .Net, ASP.NET, MS SQL

 
IMPLEMENTING SCRUM AND AGILE METHODS

About Forbrugerliv

Forbrugerliv ApS provides Internet retail and B2B commerce services. The company is based in Copenhagen, Denmark. As of September 12, 2006, Forbrugerliv ApS is a subsidiary of JP/Politikens Hus A/S.

Challenge

Forbrugerliv was not completely satisfied with the overall integration and performance of their offshore team in Ukraine and felt that there was room for improving the productivity. The main challenges initially identified by Forbrugerliv were centered on the collaboration between their onshore and offshore teams. Predictability and transparency of the work performed by the two teams seemed to be the main barrier for a better development output.

Solution

Ciklum Services and Consulting (CSC) were engaged to assist Forbrugerliv in identifying the real drivers for the underperformance and manage the implementation of the associated changes into the project. The project audit performed by CSC resulted in the following assessment:

Productivity improvement

• The teamwork and communication between the offshore and onshore team needed to be improved. There were no clear project organization or distribution of responsibilities
• Transparency and predictability of the project would be improved by adopting a more structured way preparing project delivery plans and making time estimates of each specific task
• Taking a more structured approach to testing would decrease the overall release cycle and improve quality of work

At the conclusion of the project audit, CSC suggested Forbrugerliv to adopt an agile project methodology using SCRUM principles at its core.

Implementation process

The implementation of the changes needed was initiated by a 1-day SRUM training session. The training session was conducted by a CSC Scrum coach and involved all team members ensuring a broad understanding of the methodology - both the theoretical and practical elements. The outcome of the session was a joint team understanding - the offshore team and onshore development leads - of the way forward as well as the structure of the project team that would support it.

The first month during which Forbrugerlivs team followed the agile methodology CSCs SCRUM coach monitored and coached the team in their planning, retrospective, demo and daily meetings ensuring a smooth transition into using the agile development approach and thus reaching the objectives determined before initiating the program.

Results

“After adopting and implementing the agile methodology to our project we have already in our first sprint seen an efficiency improvement of roughly 30-35%. Further, it’s clear that while we are having faster releases we are also improving our code quality significantly. On the team side in general, it is also my clear understanding that our Danish and Ukrainian teams sense a higher level of accomplishment in their daily work which is a great motivation factor going forward. We are glad that we made the decision to involve CSC in helping us achieve better results and can certainly recommend others to do the same”, Jeppe Jelsbech Knudsen, Production Manager, Forbrugerliv.

Reference date: June 2009

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