Agile change and transformation
How do you know if you are developing and maturing as a team? How do you know you are getting good at this agile stuff? Typically agile talks about the soft side of things with a focus on the less tangible aspects such as individuals and interactions. Are there things that teams can tangibly work towards and measure their progress against? This video presents metrics that will help you assess the agile maturity of your team.
This article presents the changes needed to create collaborative agile teams. It explains that you need to modify in your traditional project management team both the process, the way people get work done, and how people work together.
The five stories presented in this article, mostly based on real life, might help you see how Agile can become mechanical and what you should do about this. You will also learn some solutions that could help to solve all five symptoms. We need to allow people to act like people and not try to force them into a machine model that we have created for them.
Implementing Scrum on a custom (or bespoke) software development project can be difficult and many organizations new to the agile methodology struggle to adopt it. Typical issues/obstacles that arise include lack of business ownership and the inability to make decisions, limited business buy-in into the concept of Agile or team communication and individual skills. When introducing Agile, organizations often attempt to tackle all of these issues head on and get overwhelmed with the new methodology, then choosing to revert back to what they are familiar with. Why not moving gradually to Scrum, enabling an organization to deal with issues one at a time and gain the benefits associated with solving each issue gradually?
This article suggests that it would be wise to think, very candidly, whether Agile is really something that your company can achieve. The less transparency is tolerated in a company, the less traction Agile will get. Another key prerequisite for being Agile is having the ability to have adult conversations.
In this blog post, Ian Alderson presents the various changes they made during the Agile adoption journey at his company to tailor the software development process to their needs. He reached the conclusion that “one size doesn’t fit all” and that the drive for the improvements to the process should come from the retrospectives.
This article uses a tree metaphor to explains that Scrum is a very tiny yet powerful machine that will not achieve its goal if you customize it.