I often cite Salesforce in my classes as a company that has:

  1. gone “all in” from an Agile Transformation perspective;
  2. done it in an abrupt Top Down fashion;
  3. has gone from technology to IT to now Organization-wide in their adoption;
  4. but most importantly is a company who shares its lessons in the community.

I always lament the fact that too few companies that are adopting agile approaches actually share their lessons publicly. Oh sure, some small bit leak out, but most unfortunately decide to keep their practices to themselves.

Year of Living Dangerously

This deck shares about how their initial journey during the timeframe of 2007-2008 in adopting agile (Scrum) for their development teams –

http://www.slideshare.net/sgreene/the-year-of-living-dangerously-extraordinary-results-for-an-enterprise-agile-revolution-368526

White Papers

Here are a few supporting whitepapers from those “early days” at Salesforce –

http://www.slideshare.net/sgreene/agile-white-paper

http://www.slideshare.net/sgreene/agile-development-meets-cloud-computing-for-extraordinary-results-at-salesforcecom

http://www.slideshare.net/sgreene/large-scale-agile-transformation-presentation

Forbes Article

And this is a look at it from an executive’s perspective –

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/04/14/how-marc-benioff-of-salesforce-com-became-the-most-valuable-ceo-of-all/

The ADM Methodology

One of the things that Salesforce decided was to “tailor” an agile methodology for themselves. It’s based on Scrum, but has some unique focal points for their culture and implementation.

http://www.sfisaca.org/images/SFDC%20ADM%20Lifecycle-%20V2.pdf

Wrapping up

I am incredibly thankful for the folks at Salesforce sharing their Agile Transformation lessons learned over the years. When I was researching this article, I noticed that some things I recall seeing a few years ago seem to be missing. So I’d recommend you search broadly and deeply. However, it’s worth it because they really have done a nice job of sharing.

Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

 

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