Rolling Your Own Agile

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

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Are you geographically distributed and transitioning to agile? It's time to create your own agile lifecycle. Start with the principles of agile and decide how to create an environment that works for you, your team and your context.

Imagine this scenario: you want to transition to agile, and you have a geographically dispersed team with people all over the world. You have two developers in the U.K. and two in Boston; two testers in Portland, Oregon; a product manager in Brazil; and you, the project manager, in Sweden. You are pretty sure that transitioning to agile would make a difference to your project because you’ve used agile before on a different project in a different organization. And because you are geographically distributed, you know you can’t use an agile-out-of-the-box solution. What do you do?

The Agile Approach
One approach is to start with the principles of agile and decide how to create an agile environment that works for you, your team and your context. You create your own agile lifecycle. That’s what Joakim, a Swedish project manager did. Joakim and I spoke when he was organizing the team. He asked about the iteration length. I asked if he thought the team could manage a one-week iteration. He thought not; he thought a two-iteration would be a big enough shock to their system.

Why a short iteration, such as one or two …

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