Agile Results Require Capacity Balance: Got the Courage?

Bob Galen is the President and Principal Consultant of RGCG, L.L.C. a Cary, N.C.-based agile methods coaching & training consultancy. He is a deeply experienced Agile & Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) who is active in the agile community and regularly writes & teaches on all topics related to the agile methods. Bob has written two agile related books: Scrum Product Ownership, a definitive work surrounding agile product ownership, and Agile Reflections, which is focused toward mature agile patterns. He can be reached at [email protected] and join his mailing list at http://eepurl.com/IAxTD.

  Agile   Leadership   Stakeholder Management  

Not that long ago, I received an email from someone in the northwestern part of the United States. They were thinking of moving to agile approaches, and they wanted to pick my brain surrounding the logistics of “going agile.”

This was an IT group within a division of a very large manufacturing organization. There were about 25 folks on the team organized into four groups that aligned with the applications or functions they were supporting. There was a director, and each group had a manager/technical lead.

They supported 100-plus applications--many of them driven by corporate apps that this organization was leveraging, so there was a legacy component to their work. They were also building a new set of applications for a new product line being developed.

When I asked the director why he was thinking of engaging agile practices, he said:

“Bob, we’re really struggling to keep up with external demand. There is a perception that ‘it takes forever for us to update or release anything.’ We also have a fairly significant quality problem and our rework is high. I’m also having an incredibly tough time planning our work, as things change or come up all of the time. I’m hoping ‘agile’ will help with or solve most of these challenges.”

The Work
Next, I asked a series of questions around the project work they …

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