Leading Your Organization's Transition to 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.
Are you wondering what it would take to transition your organization to agile, for real? Maybe your organization has made a half-hearted attempt to transition to agile for some projects. Maybe you are the champion, but agile hasn’t gained the traction you expected by now.
Consider these tips to retrench and improve your organization’s transition…
Tip 1: Make Sure Your Own Project is Agile
Remember what Gandhi said: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
I know this sounds obvious, but make sure your own project is agile. It doesn’t have to be name-brand agile or lean, but you have to make sure your project is delivering value consistently, every week or two. If you use iterations, make sure those iterations are not longer than two weeks. Why? So you obtain feedback early, from the product owner/customer.
The product owner isn’t the only one who provides feedback to the team--the team gives itself feedback. The shorter the iteration, the more the team tends to work together, to finish stories together and see its bottlenecks.
As you help the team reflect in the retrospectives, what does the team choose to improve? Is it the same things, again and again? Or is the team improving, and choosing new things to improve? Can you show other people how the team has improved over time?
One agile project manager…
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