With an over 70% failure rate of change management programs, long term sustainability is difficult to achieve. One of the root causes of change failure is behavioral change, simply getting people to do their day-to-day work a different way. Most change management methodologies employ techniques to incentivize or force behavioral change, but these techniques need to be customized to the culture and processes of the organization. Railinc has approximately 50 projects using Agile Development per year, so this becomes even more of a challenge.

One of the techniques we employed to address the challenge was to develop business vocabulary and business rule standards for our business and technical teams to follow. The standards were put in place to ensure high-quality deliverables from our multi-year program to achieve the expected benefits and ROI.

We found that the best way to ensure people follow standards is quality reviews. In this session we will explore how we determined what kinds of standards were essential, how those standards were developed and defined, and how the quality-review process supports desired changes in behavior.

Learning Objectives

• Understand how quality reviews can ensure use of shared business vocabulary and creation of intelligible business rules in agile projects
• Determine when to perform quality reviews in the SDLC taking into account cross-team variance
• Use quality reviews to drive compliance, help change behavior, and ensure follow-through of new techniques
• Design the quality review process and determine which standards are important to review and emphasize
• Show how the quality review process ensures business rule traceability to implemented code