Buckled up and all set to kick-start your Agile transformation journey? Watch out for these Agile road signs to ensure a safe journey.
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2. The Juxtaposition
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What if a rookie car driver is suddenly asked to drive a heavy duty truck?
This is how most enterprises feel when they precipitously decide to jump on the Agile bandwagon
Let's look at some of the road signs that you need to keep an eye out !
3. 3
1. Do Not Over Speed: Big Bang Approach To Agile
ONE
WAY
Imagine if somebody goes to fifth gear directly from the
first gear leading to a halt within seconds
Similarly, some enterprises might step on the gas
pretty early and most likely end up in a tangle
First test the waters then organically step up the
game and scale agile to multiple teams
4. 4
2. Leadership drives Vision: Green signal
Lack of a clear cut vision and objective from the leadership
creates chaos just like a malfunctioning traffic signal
Lack of executive support in enterprises hurts large scale
agile transformation and delays agile adoption over time
Enterprise agility requires a top-down commitment to drive
the new way of thinking and delivering value
5. 5
3. Resistance to Change: No Turn
This can be overcome by setting up a centralized Agile
team tasked with the responsibility of coaching teams
True agility is when all teams of an enterprise adopt agile
practices and not just the IT teams
In fact, organizational resistance to change is the biggest
challenge to adopting and scaling Agile
6. 6
4. Business IT Alignment: Broken bridge sign
But we feel in the coming days IT will drive the business
and both the units will have to converge
There always exists a gap between the business and the
IT teams
The business teams constantly cavil about the IT teams not
being up to speed and the IT guys cry in vain about lack of
clarity from the executives
7. 7
5. Fear of Failure: Accident prone zone
In the event of a negative feedback, the teams pivot and work
on a new feature, also learning valuable lessons in the process
Most enterprises hesitate to adopt agile because of the fear of
failure
Agile advocates iterative development which identifies fallacies
sooner, thereby enabling a fail fast approach
In a fail fast approach, during development the teams check
with the customer for feedback at regular intervals
8. 8
6. Flawed estimation technique: Landslide sign
While the jury is out on the perfect estimation technique,
planning poker and bucket system works for most teams
Getting your estimation technique wrong can completely
derail your release plans
A flawed technique can result in over commitment and
delivery slippage
9. 9
7. Playing without a coach: Slippery road sign
Teams largely align themselves to deeply inculcated habits
in their enterprises
These age old mental models take the steam off their agile
journey
Agile coaches help teams unlearn these mental models
and inculcate Agile values
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8. Being a Feature Factory: U turn sign
Being a feature factory not only affects the morale of team
members but can even affect the fortunes of a company
Every team member must definitely know the purpose behind
building the product and their prospective users
Successful teams start with building a Minimum Viable Product
(MVP) and incrementally add features based on stakeholder
feedback.
11. 11
9. Ineffective Collaboration: No horn sign
Agile vouches for co-location and face to face communication
which is challenging task for large enterprises
In such a setup teams generally tend to work in silos and when
there are dependencies, all hell breaks loose
To boost collaboration enterprises can use tools like Video
conferencing and Agile project management products
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10. Lack of Automation: Pedestrian only sign
Agile without automation is like driving your brand new Sports
car on a mud track and finally blaming the car's engine
Without a robust automation ecosystem in place, the teams will
struggle to keep up with the pace (and quality) that Agile
warrants