Management can get the feeling of losing control when their enterprise adopts agile and starts deploying self-organizing teams. Procedures, review boards and consultation bodies can become superfluous when switching to an agile approach, but they may not realize that, says Marcel Heijmans. Trying to regain control with additional planning can make things worse, causing "death by planning".
Worldwide Agile Coach Camps continue to allow coaching practitioners to share knowledge and experience with a view to improving outcomes for agile teams across many countries and industries. This post lists upcoming Coach Camps, looks at how and why they work and discusses their impact with participants.
Adopting agile in organizations usually impacts the role and activities of project managers. Scrum offers the possibility for project managers to become Scrum masters or product owners. Project managers can also adopt their way of working and the things they do to work together with Scrum masters and agile teams.
Agile software development teams have to assure that the products that they develop have sufficient quality. Management often also expect that they increase their velocity to be able to deliver more functionality faster to their customer. Several authors explored the relationship between quality and velocity and suggested ways to improve both quality and velocity.
Agile retrospectives are mostly done at the team level or at a project level. What if you need to conduct a retrospective with 50 teams or more? Luke Hohmann describes how a large scale agile transformation project did a huge retrospective to create insight on what was going well and what needed to be improved.
Sam Gluckenheimer opened the Agile 2014 conference with a talk titled "The Journey to Cloud Cadence" in which he discussed the transformationt at Microsoft Developer Division from a waterfallian box product delivery cycle of four years to Agile practices enabling a hybrid SaaS and on-prem business, triweekly delivery of new features in the service, and quarterly delivery for on-premise customers.
Continuous learning supports agile adoption in enterprises. A culture change can be needed to enable and support continuous learning. There are several things that managers and agile coaches can do to establish and nurture a continuous learning culture.
The Guide to Critical Success Factors in Agile Delivery discusses the values, benefits and challenges of agile and proposes critical success factors for implementing an agile delivery in the federal government. InfoQ interviewed Paul Gorans about implementing agile practices, how agile impacts acquisition and procurement, scaling agile communication and the usage of reviews in agile.
Scaling Agile is a source of great consternation - what does it mean, how to scale, what framework or approach to use, what techniques need to change when adopting agile at scale, etc. Richard Dolman & Steve Spearman have built a matrix for comparing agile scaling frameworks. They spoke to InfoQ about their work.
Top-down implementation of agile is a commonly use approach for agile adoption in organizations. Alternative approaches exist, like implementing agile by stealth, using continuous improvement teams, starting with a quiet phase or taking baby steps by implementing a limited set of agile practices.
The Agile Australia 2014 conference was held in Melbourne, Australia last week. Over 950 people from all around Australia, New Zealand and beyond attended this annual event. The theme of this year’s conference was Embracing Disruption, there were 41 sessions covering five broad topic areas.
Jan-Joost Bouwman and Mark Heistek, from ING Retail Banking Netherlands, presented at Devopsdays Amsterdam how a CMMI-ITIL organization transitioned to a more agile mindset. Somewhat unusually in this kind of sessions, ING presented quantitative evidence of the improvements, such as a marked increase in the number of changes deployed to production and a decrease of the risk value per change.
Changing role of traditional managers in agile projects explained by Robert Galen and Zappos approach of halocracy organizational model.
Several authors discussed the importance of training for the success of agile adoption. Teams usually receive training when organizations are adopting agile. The question is how much and what kind of training and coaching is needed for the managers to make an agile transformation succeed.
The Spark the Change conference runs in London on 3-4 July. The theme of the conference is “Create an Organisation you can Believe in”. Aimed at leaders from across the business the conference aims to inspire attendees to build better, strong businesses, become more inspiring leaders themselves and create happier workplaces. InfoQ spoke to one of the organisers about the conference.