Citrix Online’s transformation to Scrum@Scale style agile was led by Dan Greening. In years prior, the company’s average release lead time had risen from six months to over 24 months under traditional RUP project management. Citrix Online was losing market share and experiencing high churn rates. Citrix Online first hired an external trainer for to create a handful of Certified Scrum Masters, then instituted company-wide internal Scrum training and coaching.

Working with the VP Product Management and the VP Engineering, Greening and Agile Program Office team implemented a scale-free form of Scrum over the entire product suite, now called Scrum@Scale and endorsed by the Scrum Alliance. The average release lead time dropped to less than 3 months. Citrix Online’s market share rose, bringing it to #2 in the online meeting industry, beating Microsoft and running just behind WebEx. These papers discuss the implementation details and release data.

• Dan R. Greening, “Enterprise Scrum: Scaling Scrum to the Executive Level,” Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (Jan 2010).
• Dan R. Greening, “Release Duration and Enterprise Agility,” Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (Jan 2013).

At Citrix Online, Greening also developed a new method of capitalizing agile labor that produced auditable financial data in mixed opex-capex environments, while eliminating the need for detailed time-tracking. This method has been adopted by several other large companies—including Amex, Physicians Mutual, and others—after they attended an Agile Capitalization Workshop.

Dan worked for me at CitrixOnline for 3 years. Under his leadership we were able to transform a 350 person waterfall development department into a highly effective agile/scrum organization. Dan has unparalleled knowledge in agile, scrum and development efficiency. His results oriented guidance decreased the average time for project delivery by more than 80%. I would recommend him to head engineering or agile programs for any organization interested in development efficiency or agile processes. —Justin Madison, VP Engineering, Citrix Online

Following this transformation, Citrix Online stumbled in its agile journey, advised by a traditional organizational development manager to reorganize its highly interdependent product lines into silos, against Greening’s advice. Though this may have seemed like an innocuous change, the fixed-budget silos damaged Citrix Online’s business agility, extended lead times, led Greening and some colleagues to leave the company, and ultimately reversed Citrix Online’s market gains. The company was bought by startup competitor LogMeIn.

• Dan R. Greening, “Citrix Online Case Study,” Scrum@Scale LLC (Jun 2018).

This case study illustrates an important aspect of business agility: It is a discipline that requires ongoing coaching, like competitive athletics or long-term weight-loss. Transforming to an agile organization leads to enormous gains in profitability and other business metrics. However, maintaining agility requires diligence. Organizations cannot adopt agile and then casually assume it will remain, like a well-tuned aircraft, agile requires attention. Similar regression problems have accompanied post-agile reorganizations in Yahoo, MySpace, and many other companies. Hire great agilists to stay great.

Under Senex Rex, Dan Greening, joined Skype in 2012 as its Palo Alto Agile Coach, and quickly became the leader of the worldwide Agile Coach Team. Skype was a highly distributed software development organization, with engineers in 5 locations: London, Prague, Stockholm, Tallinn, Moscow, and Palo Alto. Highly interdependent teams were distributed across multiple locations, making collaboration difficult. Senex Rex brought in additional coaches to integrate Microsoft development teams with Skype. In this environment, coordinated coaching and team metrics became an essential element. Metrics were used to identify critical teams for focused coaching, to forecast delivery dates, and to measure coaching outcomes. These are documented in this paper:

• Dan R. Greening, “Agile Enterprise Metrics,” Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (Jan 2015).

Skype continues to be organized under agile methods at Microsoft.

Others

In addition to the examples above, we have helped Glassdoor, AdventureBox, Overstock and others reorganize departments, develop software, and deliver customer-loved products and services, more rapidly and efficiently. When you hire Senex Rex, you are hiring creative people that can work closely with your specific environment, and create custom agile solutions best suited for you.