Bend the knee and sprint repeatedly - training a university to become more agile
Rikupekka Oksanen
At University of Jyväskylä we have 6 faculties ranging from humanities to education and hard sciences. We have separate institutes, 15 000 students and 2700 staff members plus adding another 14 000 students from Open University. There is a huge demand for more and better digitalization in all fields: study, research, administration.
At digital services, we support, maintain and develop new digital solutions. But how to effectively serve such a vast amount of different needs, clashing priorities and changing processes? The answer is agile software development. But, there's a problem: big organization is not that nimble...
So how to bring out the best agile practices and teach them to university's head, all departments and administration, in addition to all developers, who already are and do agile? How to bring all these people together in the same pages of a book.
University of Jyväskylä has adopted SAFe, Scaled Agile Framework in 2018-2019 to resolve software-related issues, and more. I'll tell about the challenges, the doubts, the success and obstacles we have had to overcome during the year, where we are aiming with organization wide agility and how we are doing it. It is a big change in mindsets and in practices, but seems to be very useful already.
PS. I'll try to give this as a short talk, but most likely could talk for hours about this :)