The danger in ALMOST working [agile|any methodology]

If you are to endaveour on a journey from a, say, waterfall-style project model to an agile one, it's EXTREMELY IMPORTANT that the people in your team - even if you have a big team - are with you on that journey. If not, individual team members can easilly just take the terms - "agile" - for example, apply their own logic and then presume that everyone else view the world like they do.

Practical example: Today, a colleague of mine was working on a sprint backlog item when his project manager rushed in, saying "stop what you're doing! I have a production issue that you have to take care of". Said and done, my colleague dropped what he was doing and started working on the production issue.

Moments later, a tester from anothter team came rushing to my colleague, and told him to help the tester with an issue; it was extremely important! My colleague, trying to follow scrum practices, asked the tester to talk to the project manager, so that they could weigh the issues against eachother. The tester got furious, saying "I thought we worked with Agile here!". The project manager was stunned to put in such focus.

The point I am making is this: The tester, applying his own logic to the word Agile, got frustrated because my colleague was, obviously, not agile! My colleague on the other hand, realized that he could only get one thing done at a time, no matter the priority. Had they had the same point-of-view - followed the same practices - issues like this would not occur.

The issue got solved with some loud voices followed by some reasoning. It all turned out OK this time, but both time and frustration would have been saved if they had read the same material (the new methodology of choice), and/or attended the same courses before starting in projects.

One point of Scrum is just this - develop a common language and a framework so that team members can work efficiently together ... and isolated from other teams.

I recommend organizations that would like to try scrum to read the following books:

  • Agile Project Management with Scrum (Ken Schwaber) [A book for EVERYONE]
  • Agile Software Development with Scrum (Ken Schwaber och Mike Beedle) [More focused on the DEVELOPMENT]

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