Agilent Case Study

Agile Transformation at Agilent Technologies describes a large-scale Agile transformation of Agilent's Software & Informatics Division, undertaken to address a serious problem with delivery predictability. At the beginning of the initiative, the organization was meeting fewer than 20 percent of its release deadlines. One software release review revealed 185 points of previously unscoped work and resulted in another four-month delay. Leadership initiated an organization-wide Agile transformation to improve predictability, transparency, and coordination across the development organization.

The transformation involved approximately 150 people across multiple locations, including teams in California, Delaware, Germany, and France, as well as contractors in other locations. The organization developed software supporting Agilent's analytical instruments, with customers in highly regulated industries and unusually long product and software deployment cycles. These constraints made a straightforward application of conventional software Agile practices impractical and required thoughtful adaptation.

Kevin Thompson, Ph.D., helped establish a common Agile framework across the organization through training, coaching, organizational restructuring, and implementation of a shared set of collaboration and work-management tools. The transformation introduced common Scrum practices and vocabulary across teams, along with Agile Program Management roles and practices including Area Product Owners, Program Managers, Release Planning, Scrum-of-Scrums meetings, Release Backlog refinement, Release Reviews, Release Retrospectives, and Burn-Up charts.

One of the central milestones was a two-week Sprint Zero in which 14 teams developed an eight-month Release Plan for the organization's most complex project. Teams worked across geographic locations to establish requirements, estimate Stories, Epics, and Defects, lay out the work across 15 Sprints, and explicitly identify cross-team dependencies. The resulting plan was subsequently recorded in JIRA and used as the basis for ongoing development and coordination.

The transformation produced substantial improvements in predictability and transparency. The organization subsequently delivered software with its prescribed feature set on schedule—the first on-time release that participants could remember—and reported improvements in estimation, communication, accountability, resource management, and morale. Leadership also gained greater visibility into emerging problems, allowing teams to begin addressing issues earlier rather than discovering them at the end of a release cycle.

Although this case study focuses on software development, it provides a detailed example of Agile Program Management at scale: coordinating multiple teams, establishing common practices across geographic boundaries, managing cross-team dependencies, creating medium-term Release Plans, and aligning team-level development with broader business objectives. These principles are also relevant to complex hardware and hardware-software product development.