The first six months of an agile transformation are usually the easy part. There is a kickoff, a round of training, a few teams producing working software every two weeks, and a sponsor who likes the energy. Then the energy…
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A year into an agile transformation, the sponsor asks a fair question: is it working? The usual answers are not encouraging. “We’ve trained 400 people” describes activity. “Velocity is up 30%” describes a number that teams can raise by estimating…
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You can’t write a fixed-scope, fixed-price contract for work whose point is to change the scope as you learn. Yet many agile engagements still arrive wrapped in exactly that kind of paper. The contract and the method pull in opposite…
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Every agile method comes with opinions, and every enterprise comes with exceptions. A team that builds a mobile app, a team that integrates an enterprise resource planning (ERP) package, and a team that maintains a 20-year-old billing system don’t share…
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Most scaling frameworks answer the question “How do we coordinate many teams?” by adding things: roles, layers, planning events, and diagrams that need a large monitor. Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) answers with a different instinct. It asks what you can take…
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When teams go agile, the project management office (PMO) is often the first group to feel the chill. Templates, weekly status reports, and compliance checks suddenly look like friction to people who want to ship. Some PMOs respond by tightening…
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Ask a dozen enterprises where their agile adoption struggles and a surprising number will give the same answer. It isn’t the developers, the tools, or the training. It’s the product owner. The role looks simple on a Scrum diagram, and…
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Scrum works well for one team of seven or so people. Big companies, though, have dozens of teams that depend on each other, plus portfolios of work that executives need to steer. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), introduced in 2011…
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Most large companies can’t drop their gate reviews overnight, and most shouldn’t try. Gates exist because executives need to decide where to put money, and that need doesn’t go away when a team starts using Scrum. The good news is…
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When the Project Management Institute (PMI), the organization behind the Project Management Professional (PMP) credential and the PMBOK Guide, launched its own agile certification, plenty of people raised an eyebrow. The PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) became available in 2012.…
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