Is Agile Working for Your Project?

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.

  Agile  

A client asked me to do an assessment. He wasn’t sure agile was working for their teams. The standup meetings felt like micromanagement. People were on several projects, so they didn’t meet their commitments. The project manager had to translate the project’s progress and status to Gantt charts. Worst of all, people went through the motions of agile, but they were not happy about it.

I asked him several questions about how they had transitioned to agile:

1. How long are your iterations?
2. Does each item in your backlog get to “done” at the end of the iteration, or do you have work that is not complete at the end?
3. Does the team have a retrospective at the end of each iteration?
4. How much work is in progress at any given time?
5. What does your velocity chart look like?

How Long Are Your Iterations?|
Some people like short iterations, such as one or two weeks. Some teams think they can’t possibly accomplish anything in a two-week iteration. Or, they see the iteration planning as overhead.

I have found that I can ask two questions to determine a good guideline for iteration duration:

1. When do you need feedback?
2. How much can you afford to throw away?

Teams transitioning from waterfall are accustomed to thinking about large feature sets, not small features. You can help the team by …

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