Adopting Agile, Part 3

  Agile   ProjectsAtWork  

Too many organizations confuse doing agile with being agile. In the third installment of our series on adopting and scaling lean and agile principles: some battle-tested dos and don’ts, including the dangers of rewards and the benefits of stumbling.

This article is the third in a series of excerpts from Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum (Addison-Wesley Professional, January 2010) by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde [ISBN 0321636406, Copyright 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.] For more information: www.informit.com/title/0321636406.

Try: Human Infection. Thinking and acting outside the box is possible but hard when everyone is inside it. Lean thinking, agile principles, self-organizing teams, test-driven development, feature teams, manager-teachers — these are mindset, culture and behavior changes, and to be sticky or meaningful, these kinds of changes require human infection from experts through long-term face-to-face coaching.

In the most successful adoptions we have seen, the organization established internal coaches supplemented with external coaches (both were important), and emphasized lots of hands-on mentoring from these agents-of-change during the real work.

Avoid: “Rewards Work”

Performance-based incentives lead to …

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