Last week, we introduced Argos Framework in our blog. It is a frameworkcreated to develop independent products which are integrated into a single final product. It is a framework that, among other things, brings together best practices from other frameworks such as SAFe and Nexus. As it makes use of Scrum and Lean Kanban, it works with different Product Backlogs, giving great importance to the management of interdependencies, providing a very deep refinement, which helps define a transparent and aligned Roadmap, which can generate the greatest possible value for the suite of products.
In order to make Argos framework known, we decided at Stratio to start out by showing it to the rest of the Agile community. We not only wanted to showcase it, but we also wanted to get feedback to improve the way we work as much as possible. In this post, we will summarize the different events we have attended and the feedback we obtained in each of them.
Agile Open Space 2017 (AOS)
AOS is a conference in which the Agile community gathers. We travelled to Segovia to present the Argos framework for the very first time. AOS has an Open Space format so firstly, each candidate gives a short pitch on what they want to give a talk on, and then the attendees vote on which talks they would like to attend. After processing the results, the agenda is generated. The talk “Argos! Building a universe of products”, was a success and was selected. It was Alberto Serrano, former Agile Coach, who introduced it. The feedback that was given was pretty good. People were mainly interested in the frameworks we considered before creating Argos. Frameworks such as SAFe, LeSS, Nexus… They also showed special interest in how we carry out the reviews with the clients and how we fit the framework in teams such as support and sales.
BBVAgile Conference 2017
The BBVA-Agile is an internal and annual conference held by BBVA at its headquarters in which hundreds of people from different countries attend. We have been working with BBVA -one of the top banks worldwide known- to transform and build its digital strategy around Big Data and AI. Stratio’s Agile Team was invited to this event to explain the Argos framework and also we were lucky to be the only ones who did not belong to BBVA. Here is where we showed the actual poster for the very first time, which helped us explain Argos better.
Conference Agile Spain (CAS) 2017 – the most voted talk!
The last event we attended in which we introduced Argos was CAS. This is an event that takes place in Spain and that focuses on all things related with the Agile world. It is held in Seville, in the Fibes Congress and Exhibition Center, and more than 700 people attended. As in other Agile conferences, the agenda was also created using a voting system where all attendees participated. In this case, the name of the talk was “Argos, when Scrum is not enough” and the speakers were Alberto Serrano, former Agile coach, and Esther Peinado, Agile coach at Stratio. This time was again a success and the talk was one of the most voted out of over 250 talks. It was exhibited the first day of the conference in the Ronda room and we had a very large audience. We managed to get the attention of people like Jerónimo Palacios, an Agile example who is known worldwide. One of the particularities of CAS 2017 is that there was a very original way of giving feedback. It was a mailbox in which attendees introduced their feedback at the end of each talk. The feedback consisted of rating the talk out of 5 and adding a short text with ideas or ways to improve. We obtained an average score of 4! In the following picture you can see our feedback:
All attendees agreed that we have come up with an excellent work solution for large teams and complex products. Many attendees were also inspired to apply it to their use cases and some attendees also confirmed that, in general, many conventional frameworks do not work. In summary: very good solution and very well explained.
Conclusions
Although at Stratio we have already found the structure to work with, we are sure we must continue growing and improving our product. This Kaizen mindset has brought us to the road we are on at this moment and we hope to continue like this!
