Having your organization make the mental shift necessary to adopt agile is the first important step in an agile transformation. But once you decide you want to change, now what? Should you attempt your agile adoption yourselves or hire an expert? Joel Bancroft-Connors details the benefits and downsides of going it alone and of using contract, consultant, and full-time agile coaches so you can decide what's best for you.

It’s usually easy and inexpensive to set up a continuous integration environment for either an agile or a waterfall project. Perhaps the most obvious benefit of CI is the elimination of the integration phase that existed in traditional waterfall projects, where we typically slip the worst on deadlines. But there are many other benefits to continuous integration that you may not have considered.

You've heard of a minimum viable product, which has only enough features to create a working model and provide feedback for further development. If you want to get started on a new project quickly, Allan Kelly suggests assembling a minimum viable team—only a few people, with only the necessary skills. They begin work right away, with a small budget and tight feedback loops, driving down risk.

What has agile taught us about trying to plan everything up front? It usually doesn’t work. So why does your company still use a yearly strategic planning approach that takes six months to develop and requires significant time and effort to pivot to new opportunities and challenges? We need to rethink strategic planning to incorporate design thinking, collaboration, and agility.