Agile working with Scrum at Wienerberger

In order to identify potential improvements, the first step was to visually develop the framework conditions in a process workshop. The business and product owner, a scrum master and management were represented in the workshop. Based on this, the process was divided into different phases and adjustments to the tool-side support in Jira and Confluence were discussed.
The overall process was divided into the following phases: business and technical refinement, development, testing and deployment. In particular, the creation of separate backlogs for refinement represented a step towards greater efficiency. The result: business refinement now serves to enable business owners to assess new topics at an early stage. The main focus here is on the pre-qualification of benefits and costs. Stories can be rejected here if it becomes apparent that they could be judged as “too expensive” or “too unimportant”. All other stories that are not rejected go on to the development team for “technical refinement” and later on to development.

As part of the process adjustments, clear phases were defined for business and product owners as well as for the development team. Jira Kanban and Scrum boards are now used by the responsible teams to manage tasks.

Transparency of prioritization was achieved by introducing the WSJF method (“Weighted Shortest Job First”). This allows business owners to assess change requests in terms of “business value”, “time criticality”, “risk reduction” and to put them in relation to the “job size”. The value determined in this way provides valuable assistance in prioritization and gives the product owner and the development team a better understanding of the reason for the chosen priority.

The process in Jira is supported by documentation in Confluence. Details of the content, meeting notes on the tasks and change requests are visible at a glance in the Jira process and can be easily viewed.

The process was initially implemented only for the local IT team. The international rollout then took place in two steps: a core team of a few key users was trained in the new process and how to work with Jira and Confluence. Feedback was iteratively incorporated and implemented in Jira and in the process definition. Only then was the process rolled out to all Wienerberger locations worldwide. With complete success: the new, optimized and agile way of working was adopted by all employees because transparency was created. Key users now have a better understanding of when their change requests will be processed and the development team now has a clearer prioritization of its tasks. The process for the SAP CRM team is currently being rolled out to additional SAP development teams. Wienerberger is supported by catworkx GmbH in Austria.