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Top-down Agile Adoption - March 2007
For many
organizations, top-down support for Agile initiatives is a necessity. This is
not to say that management must drive
these projects, as is the case in most plan-driven shops, but rather that
without the buy-in from business and
IT managers, most Agile initiatives cannot scale. This month's Agile Journal
contributors share a wealth of experiences and lessons learned from companies
that have enjoyed top-down support and have benefited from Agile practices.
Speaking
to the business world in business terms certainly helps. To help drive business
value, Amr Elssamadisy and John Mufarrige explore applying principles from the
Theory of Constraints and Lean Product Development to Agile software development.
Dave McMunn proposes using Agile development as a means to build an IT/business
partnership. Bryan Stallings discusses the effective and appropriate role that
senior leadership can play in order to improve the effectiveness of an Agile
transformation. Ross Pettit nets out his
top three success factors to ensure that top-down Agile projects succeed. And
Chuck Fredrick shares his Agile experiences - good and bad-- when working on Douglas
County, CO Government's IT projects.
Communication
between business and IT organizations remains paramount. Guy Beaver suggests an
"Agile-V" scorecard model for monitoring and communicating Agile project
status. Odd Martin Solem and Hans
Christian Alnæs propose that when transitioning to Agile practices,
organizations should look for the "low hanging fruit" -- the changes that have
the lowest implementation cost and the highest benefit for the company. Of
course, top-down initiatives will also benefit from a bottom-up perspective. Kirk
Knoernschild advocates that in order to improve software delivery, teams should
treat source code as a corporate asset and adopt Agile practices accordingly.
Please feel free to share your Agile experiences with the
Agile Journal community. Send us your suggestions for new themes or issues to
cover. And, if you'd like to contribute an article on this or another upcoming
topic, go to the "Letters to the Editor" in the forum at AgileJournal.com and send
us your ideas.
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Editor in Chief
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Top-Down Support Is Essential For Wide Scale Agile Adoption
Many Agile projects start as grassroots, often surreptitious, initiatives. When successful, team members do their best to publicize their accomplishments and use the project as a baseline on which to launch others. But it is unlikely that these projects can lead to company-wide adoption without support from above. Management from both the business and IT sides of the house must buy into these new ways of building software and must understand the essential differences that Agile processes espouse. Top-down adoption is not about imposing Agile practices from the top down - it's about support from upper management. IT organizations that achieve this level of support are the ones that successfully deploy Agile processes across a wide range of business projects.
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Theory of Constraints, Lean, and Agile Software Development
Delivering More Business Value Where Needed
Within the software development community, one of the biggest movements over the past decade has been Agile Development whereby teams adopt practices and attitudes consistent with the now famous Agile Manifesto. Additionally, there has been much discussion over the past four to five years about applying principles from the Theory of Constraints (ToC) and Lean Product Development (Lean) to software development. This has had a tendency to muddy the surrounding waters as teams question whether they should apply Agile, ToC, or Lean concepts. Are these three approaches mutually exclusive? Is there some hidden magic that can be unlocked by careful application of all three? Isn't it hard enough just trying to be Agile, without also trying to be Lean and ToC-ish? In this article we give an overview of Lean and ToC and show how they can be used in conjunction with Agile practices to focus on an organization's business value. By using elements of Lean, ToC, and Agile together more business value can be delivered with less effort.
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Using Agile Development To Build A Partnership Between IT and Business
The most significant hurdle in adopting agile development is often gaining the acceptance of the business leadership. Business leaders either believe that agile requires too much time, or they are generally apathetic towards the effort. But while business leaders may be difficult to get on board at the beginning, they can be the strongest supporters of the agile process once they see and understand it. Getting them to try it is the hardest part. This article addresses the typical barriers to involving the business side of the house in an agile development approach, and outlines the key steps that Digital Focus has found to be successful in overcoming these barriers.
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 | Agile Top-Down: Striking a Balance
Agile is being evangelized in executive boardrooms and introduced top-down with increasing frequency. Considering that Agile advocates self-management by the individual and within a team, what is the role of senior leadership? My experience from this top-down perspective has given me insight into attitudes and techniques that are successful, and others that fail. I assert that there is an "effective and appropriate" stance for senior leadership that will improve the effectiveness of an Agile tra...
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 | Key Success Factors in Top-Down Agile Adoption
A top-down, institutionally sponsored approach can be an effective way to roll-out Agile practices across an organization. Top-down approaches benefit from a high degree of visibility and strong executive sponsorship, both of which communicate to the entire organization that value is placed in Agile practices, values, and principles by leadership. Similarly, having a central change team coordinating the rollout accelerates organizational adoption and offers consistency in execution a...
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 | The Agile-V Scorecard
Much has been written about the Balanced Scorecard methodology. Its goal is to measure desired outcomes and predict drivers of those outcomes.[1][2] A fundamental premise is that measuring what you want to achieve helps motivate its implementation. Large-scale implementations of the Balanced Scorecard link individual processes to overall business goals. For a properly implemented Agile team, this line-of-site measurement happens naturally and is controlled daily. This ar...
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 | Treating Code As A Corporate Asset
For many teams, agile adoption represents an attempt to improve their software process. As an industry, we've been through these process improvement efforts before. Yet we continue to fail. Software development efforts fail because our attempts to improve process are fundamentally flawed. Many adaptations of the most popular iterative and incremental processes are little more than reinventions of faulty practices. They result in slightly varied manifestations of the same problems that have p...
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 | Go For The Low Hanging Fruit!
As professionals, we are always looking for ways to improve the way we work. We encounter ideas and methods that we start to implement, but often we fail. Does this sound familiar to you? How should you avoid this? You should focus on implementing the changes that have the highest benefit versus effort ratio for you and your team, or as the title of this article puts it, the low hanging fruit. To facilitate this, we suggest the following steps: Make a change backlog, Find your low hanging fruit,...
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 | CASE STUDY: How Douglas County, CO Cut A Project Timeline In Half
When the Douglas
County CO Government IT Department was asked to create a custom application for
the Sheriff's Office to track and manage the County's resident convicted sex
offenders, the project estimates using the traditional waterfall-based
methodology proved too long and too costly to gain approval from its IT
Steering Committee. Rather than cancel
the project or purchase a less optimal off-the-shelf product, we implemented it
as our first Agile/Scrum project. The...
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 | FEATURED BOOK: The Software Development Edge: Essays on Managing Successful Projects by Joe Marasco
Reviewed by Brad Appleton
The
Software Development Edge is a collection of insightful and
entertaining essays about project management and leadership by Joe Marasco.
Marasco has ingeniously and thoughtfully woven together the fabric of
true-to-life experience with some fabricated personas, proven practices,
lessons learned, and some common sense measurement that should both connect
with and enlighten any reader who has lived on a real world software
development endeavor....
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