agile transition

About 12 months ago, our company started an initiative to adopt agile practices across our entire organization—not only our software development organization, but our business organization. For years we had experienced outstanding results by utilizing Scrum for our clients' application development projects. Team productivity improved, executive visibility strengthened, and overall quality increased. Our goal was to capture similar results for our business. Find out how we're doing!

There are no best practices for creating a productive, global development organization, just a few good ideas to think about and tailor around your particular objectives. Consider three universal issues every organization must grapple with to make a global agile team successful: data considerations, communications needs, and a company's agile readiness. How you handle each of these issues will vary widely, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution for every organization.

Agile is being evangelized in executive boardrooms and introduced top-down with increasing frequency. Considering that Agile advocates self-management by the individual and within a team, what is the role of senior leadership? My experience from this top-down perspective has given me insight into attitudes and techniques that are successful and others that fail. I assert that there is an effective and appropriate stance for senior leadership that will improve the effectiveness of an Agile transformation. Key to my list of recommendations for making Agile work is the balanced involvement of both senior-level leaders and practitioners in the planning and executing the introduction of Agile practices.