Agile2014

Panera Bread is a very successful and rapidly growing bakery-cafe chain with over 1700 cafes in 44 US States and in Canada. In early 2013 the President made it clear that he was concerned about IT’s ability to keep up with the pace of change of the business. Panera decided that they need to transform the enterprise to apply agile delivery in a disciplined fashion. In this talk we show how within one year the company moved from a traditional model to an agile approach that is very aligned with the company’s established business agility.



This talk is a a balanced retrospective of things that went well, challenges that were encountered, steps taken to address issues, and plans for further improvements. The approach is based on applying the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process decision framework.



Topics

- How the success of the first pilot project prompted the President to ask for all IT solutions to be developed using agile

- How a senior level IT agile skeptic became an agile evangelist 

- How we won the business over and received commitment for dedicated Product Owners on every team

- How lightweight agile governance was initiated in the PMO

- How we rescued an agile team that was struggling with Scrum