Easy Agile Programs 2.0.0

At Easy Agile, we believe successful agile transformations are possible in every organisation and we believe Easy Agile solutions can make the journey towards greater agility smoother for every team.

12 months ago, we began investigating scaled agile transformations. We interviewed over 70 Product and Program Managers, VPs, and Release Train Engineers in large organisations across many industries. We attended the Regional SAFe Summit, Agile2018 and Atlassian Summit. We wanted to learn from those leading scaled agile transformations what their challenges were and what success looked like.

We learned that organisations often struggle to scale agility for a range of reasons. In addition to the inevitable cultural change and management challenges, they also saw impediments to:

• aligning hundreds of people and tens of teams around common quarterly objectives;
• Bringing hundreds of people together each quarter for face-to-face planning sessions;
• having visibility into the work of all these teams and how it supported a new feature; and
• understanding cross-team dependencies and which teams may need help to overcome a bottleneck.

Given our time at Atlassian and the experience gained from Easy Agile User Story Maps, we believe we can deliver a solution to overcome these challenges.

My co-founder Dave and I are extremely proud to launch Easy Agile Programs. We are grateful to everyone that spent time and shared their perspective, and to the team for the outstanding work they have put into this solution.

We hope you find Easy Agile Programs valuable and that it leads you and your teams to a new level of effectiveness.

Regards,
Nicholas Muldoon
Co-Founder & Product Manager

Introducing Easy Agile Programs

Like our first solution, Easy Agile User Story Maps, with Easy Agile Programs we sought to take an agile practice 'off the wall' and make it digital with a native App for Jira.

Easy Agile Programs for Jira:

• allows the Product Manager for a program to clearly communicate the objectives and roadmap for an increment;
• enables teams to sequence work across the program increment;
• enables teams to quickly create and visualise dependencies with other teams; and
• provides a holistic view of progress during the program increment.

Alignment at Scale

The Product Manager of a Program will set the objectives for the upcoming quarter and additionally create a roadmap to highlight an ideal sequence of work.

Teams can easily refer back to the overarching objectives and roadmap from their agile board.

Digital Program Increment Planning

We love the whiteboard; it's great for collaborating. We also know from the most recent State of Agile Survey by VersionOne that more and more teams are distributed or have remote team members. Suffice to say, it's getting harder to get everyone in the same room.

With Easy Agile Programs, you can bring everyone from the team into a digital program increment planning session.

Cross-Team Dependency Management

During the program increment planning session, a team Product Owner may want to confer with another team regarding dependencies. Using simple drag and drop of one issue card onto another team's issue card, a Product Owner can create an issue link to show when their work is blocked.

Team Capacity Planning

Teams have the ability to set a historical velocity for their upcoming sprint capacity and they will be notified when they exceed that velocity. This helps teams better sequence work throughout the program increment, or highlight where increment objectives may be at risk if a team is overcapacity.

The Easy Agile Programs Team 

Special Thanks! 

We wanted to say a big thank you to our Beta users. Your feedback during our beta was invaluable and we greatly appreciate your support!

We can't succeed without your feedback, insight and recommendations for improvement so please keep sending your feedback directly via the  button on the top right of any page in Easy Agile Programs. Thanks so much!