Agile change and transformation
Like many IT organizations in state government agencies, this New York State Government Agency primarily used Waterfall. I implemented the agency’s first agile projects. I was challenged by the agency’s unique environment, learned lessons, discovered systemic problems, overcame organizational obstacles and changed misconceptions. I will discuss what I’ve learned during this award-winning project and make recommendations for others in bureaucratic companies and government agencies. The agency’s projects are moving to agile/scrum and the institution’s IT group is incorporating agile into its PM and SDLC methodologies.
Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban: there are many approaches to manage product development and project in the Agile software development world. It is a good thing to have multiple Agile tools, but you should also know when to use them. In this article Brendan Marsh of Spotify explains why his team dropped Scrum for Kanban just before launching their product.
Implementing Scrum is difficult and it is always difficult to answer the question of where to start this Agile Travel. In this article, Ilan Goldstein shares 10 tried-and-tested steps to help new practitioners get their Scrum show on the road.
As Rex Lester explains in this article: “Implementing Scrum involves adoption of a new paradigm across the organization. In most instances, the severe level of culture shift and change aren’t really appreciated”. The article discusses the difficulties of moving an organization from a Waterfall process to an Agile approach.
In 10 years since the signing of the Agile Manifesto we’ve seen some notable successes, half-way efforts, fragile, scrum-but and just plain #FAIL. We tried to adopt agile methods to solve all types of problems, and many of those problems persist. What are the most common failure modes? How can organizations avoid falling into those failing patterns?
As Agile and Scrum are increasingly used to manage software development projects in large companies, Nancy Nee, VP Global Product Strategy at ESI International, provides us with her viewpoint on how the transition to Agile is going on. She also shares some advice on how make the adoption process as smooth as possible.
Paul Pazderski proposes in this article a scorecard to assess the level of transformation of a project team into a Scrum team. This card could be filled by an independent observer like an Agile coach to check how the team is adopting Scrum practices like Product Backlog management or Sprint Reviews.
