British telecom experience report: agile intervention - BT's Joining the dots events for organizational change

• Authors: Sandra McDowell;Nicola Dourambeis
• Venue: XP'07 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Agile processes in software engineering and extreme programming
• Year: 2007

While British Telecom (BT) has been progressing the adoption of agile practices across teams for the last two years, the overall organizational transformation has been slow to emerge and a catalyst was needed. In November 2006, BT began running a series of one hundred person, one and a half day events called Joining the Dots 3, aimed at promoting the use of agile throughout the IT organization. The event's practical approach of embedding learning through the use of videos and activities on agile planning, user stories, customer collaboration and iterative delivery into a large scale end-to-end simulation has proven to be both fun and an excellent learning tool. Simulation retrospectives inside the event echo the learning points and feedback forms have confirmed that BT may have succeeded in generating large scale buy-in to using agile practices across thousands of people in their delivery organization.