Aashish Vaidya, Cathi Row & Mark Jackson, Cambia Health Solutions
Over the last decade, agile practices continued to gain a foothold in many companies. Many of the practices were first tried on a smaller scale, and tailored to green-field projects. But, as agile practices are adopted at multi-site, larger companies, with complex back office projects, they bring with them additional and unique challenges. Take for example, Cambia Health Solutions, a not-for-profit, health Solutions Company. Cambia has a relatively large IT group, which develops its own software solutions and integrates software from other vendors. It has a distributed workforce that spans four states with many work-at-home employees. Cambia’s mainline business is regulated by various state entities and national agencies. Many of Cambia’s projects are large, mandated compliance projects that have a fixed time box and a set scope. Missing either the deadline or scope could potentially mean losing a significant portion of its business or facing monetary penalties. Can agile practices work and scale to solve business problems facing the company? What if you also operate within an IT organization that is structured with functional silos? And what if you have reluctant business partners who define software requirements and perform final verification of software solutions? To tackle these challenges, Cambia organized an Enterprise Transition Community to lead the transition from a patchwork of agile practices to a large-scale agile implementation. Find out how we carried out this transition, what we have learned along the way, and how that might help organizations of all sizes take on a similar challenge.
Aashish Vaidya, Cathi Row & Mark Jackson, 2012 Technical Paper, Abstract, Paper, Slides, Notes
