Project management has no “one size fits all” approach, but the agile rollout at salesforce.com holds lessons for many companies looking to change their production processes to meet today’s challenges. Stanford University’s Advanced Project Management Program now presents the company’s compelling success story as a real-world example of core principles taught in the certificate’s overview course, Converting Strategy Into Action. In today’s complex, fast-paced business environments, traditional “project management as usual” practices don’t work; companies need to combine proven approaches with emerging concepts to align their project initiatives with strategic goals.

Chris Fry, salesforce.com vice president of Platform Development and Steve Greene, senior director of Tools and Agile Development, present the company’s successful switch from a waterfall system to an agile-based system — from the traditional, sequential system to an emergent, iterative and empirical system. The conversion is one of industry’s largest and fastest agile transformations.

In 2006, the seven-year-old software company was growing at an extremely fast pace and experiencing growing pains within the R&D organization. Fry and Greene suggested a pilot program to incrementally transition to an agile-based system. After listening to their description of the proposed changes, Parker Harris, a salesforce.com founder and executive vice president, felt drastic change was needed. He charged the two managers to go for broke, and complete the transformation throughout the R&D organization in three months.

Fry and Greene did just that.

In their presentation for Stanford, Fry and Greene detail the good, the bad, and the ugly of the process: the challenges of implementing massive change so quickly, employee resistance along the way, their successes, and what they would do differently. Again, the salesforce.com lessons intentionally dovetail with Stanford’s goal to offer project management professionals creative, adaptable tools to meet today’s production challenges of rapid growth and to handle company-wide change.

Salesforce.com developed its own brand of project management, the Agile Development Methodology (ADM)—an adaptive mixture of agile processes (primarily Xtreme and the use of scrum teams) and the company’s own automated testing tools. While the change project had strong top-down support within the company, Fry and Greene also created the process from the bottom-up, by using cross-functional, fully empowered “scrum” teams of six to ten people. They discuss exactly how their unique adaptation of agile principles worked to bring salesforce.com back to its original productivity levels and how ADM has evolved, contributing to the company’s continued growth.

“What Chris and Steve did at salesforce.com was a breakthrough—a PM 2.0 approach,” says Ray Levitt, Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering, and the founder and academic director of Stanford Advanced Project Management. “They created their own scrum team to implement scrumming in the company; they didn’t just talk the talk, but walked the walk. They also have developed an integrated, automated testing system that has been crucial to their success.”

Levitt explains that breaking the saleforce.com code base into modules—small, functional units of code that are continuously tested throughout the development process—allows multiple small scrum teams to work in parallel on the modules that must ultimately be built into a single unified code base. This substantially speeds up production. The continual, automated testing of each module catches almost all bugs at the point of coding, eliminating the need for large-scale rework when the modules are integrated for release at the end of the production cycle.

Moreover, the salesforce.com ADM reverses the "PM 1.0" logic of having a fixed scope and attempting to impose schedule and costs targets on the development team top-down. Instead, release dates are frequent, and are fixed, but only high levels goals are established for scope. Self-sufficient and self-governed scrum teams decide which specific features they will include in a given release, and who works on each feature every day. Predictable, frequent releases reduce the pushback from marketing against postponing lower priority features until the next release.

Salesforce.com’s ADM is a drastic departure from the traditional, sequential waterfall-based, prediction and control, project management philosophy that many companies continue to use today. “While agile processes are a natural fit for software companies in the service sector, these strategies and principles are being successfully applied to manufacturing, construction, and organizational change projects,” Levitt adds. “The salesforce.com transformation models the direction of project management’s future.”

The salesforce.com case is available as part of Converting Strategy Into Action, and Fry and Greene will again present at Stanford in June and September of 2009. The study describing this agile transformation to agile product development was developed by the Advanced Project Management Center of Excellence within the Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects at Stanford.

http://crgp.stanford.edu

Delivered by the Stanford Center for Professional Development, Stanford Advanced Project Management combines Stanford’s research and education in strategy, organization theory, and project management with the project management executive education capabilities of IPSolutions.

http://scpd.stanford.edu/certificates/projectmanagement