Transitioning to Agile

'Agile Bob' explained how we can "Transition to Agile" and gave us plenty of pragmatic information that is immediately useful on our project teams.

First off, Agile is not "more in less time, its about exposing problems and fixing them." Now it doesn't sound so appealing, but notice some of the baggage that it can expose:

• with 45% of software features never used, we can use ranking vice prioritization to strategically kill what we don't need
• use the 80/20 rule to build the most important requirements first
• cut off the old - or people will go back to the legacy systems and processes
• when the company isn't agile at the top but teams have daily status meetings, you are Scrumbuts
• pop up your head every 2wks and validate that customer's needs didn't change
• every hour of overtime might mean two hours of bug fixing downstream

Other helpful teaming techniques and references are:
1. hold telecons with video to keep the team engaged, otherwise first they go on mute and then they check email
2. keep good teams together longer, because the Performing stage can be four times more productive than other Tuckman stages, so why split them up?
3. find better motivators; Drive by Daniel Pink
4. find win-win solutions using Theory of Constraints conflict resolution tool (evaporating cloud)
5. you don't want to use a computer that is running at 100% utilization, so why are you trying to schedule people that way (and don't call them 'resources')?

Finally, Agile principles and values are more important than processes.

Bob Hartman, founder of AgileForAll, is a Scrum trainer, coach, and evangelist with 30 years of experience in software development.