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We are a medium sized product org with 700 people out of which about 100 are in tech, 75 developers (leads and arch included), 15-18 QA folks, 7-8 tech product managers.

We have some 70 line items in what they call a project bucket list but if i was to really categorise them, it would be 10-15 major projects with multiple sub-projects under each bucket.

We have mobile apps, websites, administrative websites, backend components and interlinked B2B and B2C platforms with several subcomponents in various different languages from Java, .Net, .Net Core, go, php etc with some projects having dependencies on external 3rd parties ranging from Banks to govt entities to telcos etc.

The challenge I am facing is how do I get these guys to deliver predictable , efficient and relatively bug free projects.

I am no longer on the tech side but given my background as a developer and architect long ago i have been given the challenge to manage this and get the current chaotic and completely unpredictable overrunning and extremely bloated timelines to delivering things with speed ,agility, predictability and quality.

We have started using Confluence where we write our complete BRD/PRDs (user stories and details) and Jira where they are further broken down into epics, user stories, issues, tasks and subtasks.

These guys barely follow a process, how to get everyone on the same page and how to get product managers to drive the developers and QA to deliver quality output?

To give background we have 2-3 major products, but more product managers because there is just too much work on each product and hence we need a team to manage a given product.

Some help / guidance / magic formula would be greatly appreciated :)

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    Whatever approach you decide on, make sure you (or a very engaged, very passionate project sponsor) have authority to actually enforce the change and hire/fire people. A change that big will not get done in any reasonable timeframe just by "leading by influence." By all means, seek to build consensus and goodwill with all of the parties involved, but the change needs to have teeth or you are being set up for failure.
    – Pedro
    Aug 10, 2017 at 18:52
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    "These guys barely follow a process, how to get everyone on the same page and how to get product managers to drive the developers and QA to deliver quality output?" This is called leadership, and it's what is expected as table staked for your senior executives and C-suite. While there are things you can influence, defining and enforcing enterprise-scale process is not really the lone project manager's responsibility.
    – Todd A. Jacobs ♦
    Aug 11, 2017 at 17:16
  • Sounds like full-on program management. Check out Johanna Rothman's work, e.g. amazon.com/Agile-Lean-Program-Management-Collaboration/dp/…
    – yitznewton
    Sep 12, 2017 at 12:20

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I would also add that for a change of the scale you are considering, you should think small, start with one product, and one development team, try to get them up and running and then add additional products and teams as the move gets bedded in.

Also consider hiring an Agile Coach to help you, as this is no small undertaking. Ensure that there is executive sponsorship for the endeavor, as dev teams can be quite resistant to changing their way of working, often they don't see that there is any issue with the status quo.

Lastly don't give up, there will be many hurdles to overcome establishing agile techniques in an existing development organisation, but if it turns chaos into order it will have many benefits.

Good Luck!

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Scaled Scrum frameworks should work well. You can try Nexus, LeSS or SAFe. Nexus being my favorite.

In general, scaling a bad agile/scrum team is a bad idea. Also, IMO, you can hardly be effective without proper use of Continuous Integration pipelines.

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