Agile Fun Fact of the Day

How Do You Vote Someone Off of Your Agile Team?

One of the conundrums of agile conversion is that although you are ordered by management to "self-organize," you don't get to pick your own team. You may not have pictured it this way, but your agile team members are going to be the same people you worked with before, when you were all doing waterfall! I know I wasn't picturing it that way for my first agile team, so I thought I should warn you. (I thought I was going to get between six and eight original Agile Manifesto signers. That didn't happen.). Why "warn" you (as opposed to "reassure" you, say)? Because the agile process is going to reveal every wart, mole, quirk, goiter, and flatulence issue on the team within a few hours. In the old days, you could all be eccentric or even unpleasant in your own cube, communicating only by document, wiki, email, and, in extreme situations, by phone. Now you are suddenly forced to interact in real time, perhaps in person, with written messag

A Corporate Agile 10-point Checklist

I'm pretty sure my few remaining friends in the "small, collocated team agile" community are going to desert me after this, but I actually have a checklist of 10 things to think about if you're a product owner at a big company thinking of trying out some agile today. Some of these might even apply to you if you're in a smaller place. So at the risk of inciting an anti-checklist riot (I'm sorry, Pez!), I am putting this out there in case it is helpful to someone else. From http://www.yogawithjohn.com/tag/yoga-class/ Here's what you should think about: 1. Your staffing pattern. A full agile project requires that you have the full team engaged for the whole duration of the project at the right ratios. So as you provision the project, check to see whether you can arrange this staffing pattern. If not, you will encounter risks because of missing people. Concretely it means that: a. You need your user experience people (if a

Your Agile Transformation Needs to Start with a Quiet Phase

From a really great blog post on agile adoption: http://smoovejazz.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/an-agile-approach-for-adopting-agile-practices/ I've observed some different agile transformation patterns, and maybe you have too: Just Do Standups (Shoot, then Aim): some people feel that since you're "agile," you should just start doing stuff, like daily standups, and then build more of the the plan as you go. Find a team and start doing some agile with them! Start a revolution one practice at a time, one team at a time. Pros: you're very busy from the start. Cons: what exactly are you doing and why? KPI-Driven Change (Aim, then Shoot) : some people who have worked in large corporations for a while will tell you that to get the respect of the people, you need to start with a plan, support the plan with awesome printed and online collateral. Then you "kick off," tell teams what to do, and measure them using "Key Productivity Indica

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