Dear *,

Thanks for a great meeting and valuable discussion!
There was about 21 people present including 6 very happy employees of Volvo IT :).

We have started with round robin round where each of us had an great opportunity to introduce and say some words about himself. During the session we have noticed that we have community members that are coming not only from corporations, but also from mid- and small-businesses. We have had 2 girls among participants ;-)!

The main session of ACD#5 was divided in two parts: first part was about corporate process used in Volvo. Second part was about “corporate” agile.

Agenda with schedule was presented by Tomasz, however schedule was done in a little bit agile way: "Bedziemy mowili tak dlugi az sie skonczy..." - so standard situation in IT projects.

Volvo has quite standard PMI based process with well defined milestones but it is presented in very nice colors :). It is a little bit continues process since end of one project is at the same time input for new one. Roots of the process are in production methodology. Milestone is approved by steering board, which is a surprise because in most processes milestone should be approved by project team not a steering board.

What was quite interesting, is the fact that Volvo has realist planning, there are two separate phases: development and final development ;)

Volvo introduces Scrum that maps to the above process, which means that between phases there is an iteration approach and agile elements. Agile is not a must but can be chosen by project manager as an official methodology. Business is quite happy with it. There is fix time, fix costs and flexible scope. It requires quite a lot of trust between partners, it might be easier inside one group. Introduction of agile was gradually, so first some practices were introduced and later on some more.

During the discussion, there was quite a nice feedback about one agile project in NSN, it was so beautiful and perfect that it was not possible to believe it. Due to that, next Agilopolis will be lead by Kasia to discuss it a little bit more in details. Planning is done in relative way and it works perfectly, backlog grooming is done by all teams together (or their representatives) and there is no 'wyscig szczurow'. Actually, it was not corporate agile but full blown and working agile, which is very rare. On the other hand, in Volvo it is not yet fully developed but the main goal of introduction was to improve communication with business.

What was also interested that NSN process (very similar to process in Volvo) was in that one time very well separated and without influence on the team.

Best regards,
Agilopolis Team