agile transition

It's a very common pattern. Agile methods don't seem to specify much in the way of preparation or strategies for project planning-so teams simply dive-in and start iterating toward a solution to their business problems. In some contexts, such as small-scale simple projects, this works just fine. However, what if your project is more complex? How do you determine a budget when you have a distributed or larger-scale project and no real requirements? In many real-world contexts, establishing a consistent and thoughtful baseline project plan can be an incredibly powerful contributor to your ultimate success. The good news is that you can do end-to-end planning and still "be agile." Bob Galen shows how to use the Crystal Clear's Blitz Planning approach, user story mapping, and other end-to-end planning techniques to establish a "proper beginning" and define a holistic map for your agile projects.

Agile teams may unintentionally assume significant risk and excessive rework by not addressing dependencies in the product backlog. While the business defines the minimum requirements needed to deliver value and when to deliver that value-delivery dependencies-the agile team determines the necessary sequence of development-development dependencies. The challenge for everyone is balancing delivery and development dependencies. Taking a holistic approach to the product backlog enables the team to evaluate the impact of these dependencies and, as needed, adjust release and iteration plans. Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman share techniques they have used to master dependencies in backlogs.

Given the success of agile at the development team level, managers are exploring the possibility of implementing agile methodologies across the entire product lifecycle organization-beyond software development. Managers who have launched such adoption efforts are uncovering many myths, misperceptions, and obstacles that derail their efforts before they really get started. Product delivery organizations fail to become agile because they don't really understand what makes agile teams work. Mike Cottmeyer describes an agile adoption roadmap that begins with an individual team and then demonstrates how multiple teams can work together to deliver more complex projects and portfolios. He expands the agile concept beyond the development team and shows how organizations can optimize their value stream across the enterprise.

While agile adoption continues to grow rapidly in the software product development world, it has not been as widely adopted within enterprise IT departments. Even within a single company, different software organizations can have widely varied views on adopting agile concepts. Some groups are fanatical about the “A-word”; others are skeptical and dismissive. Using Medtronic as a case study, Mike Stuedemann examines the barriers to agile adoption within large, multinational corporations. He shares his experiences at Medtronic to illustrate the varied adoption paths that teams can employ to realize the benefits of agile within the enterprise. Mike learned that many of the supposed barriers to enterprise agile adoption were myths; others were real and really difficult to overcome.