Many organizations aspire to adopt agile processes such as Scrum, Kanban and even a combination like Scrumban to take advantage of the numerous benefits that they offer to an organization. Those benefits include, but are not limited to, quicker return on investment, better software quality, and higher customer satisfaction.
As part of this shift, organizations are also changing the way they work, redefining teams, work processes, and tools used to manage the work.
Making a decision to change your team’s development DNA may have significant impact on the way your company works and there are many questions you should consider:
- How can we insure that the collaboration between the teams won’t be affected
- What will happen if we decide to return to the original methodology and what will be the cost of the rollback?
- How will new methodologies support some teams and enable others to continue working with other methodologies?
- How can we make sure that different teams, working with different methodologies, can continue to collaborate in a simple and productive way?
The answer to all of these questions is that these changes need to be made in a way that will both enable one team to evolve without breaking the collaboration between other teams, and also enable the evolving team to continue and change their methodology as needed. The tools that are used should not only be able to cope with different methodologies, but also enable evolution to various other methodologies, for example evolving from Scrum to Scamban.
Looking at Planview AdaptiveWork and other companies’ experience, following are the Top 5 lessons learned about scaling Agile:
- A team-by-team, incremental approach is best.
- Measurement and management tools can help you get and sustain executive buy-in and improve the development process.
- Mentoring and coaching should be provided for the process first and for the tools second.
- Integrated tools help demonstrate value.
- Retrospectives are essential for continuous improvement.
Clarizen, that can support both your current and future methodologies, enables you to support your team’s needs and help your organization evolve. Keeping team collaboration and methodologies flexible is the right way to work.
