The Encyclopedia of Life (eol.org) is an ambitious undertaking to gather information about all of the 1.9 million known species on the planet- our deadlines are both driven by time to market AND time to extinction! Despite the challenges of working at an academic institution with no formal development process, our team has managed to successfully adopt a highly functional agile development process. If you are struggling to be agile in a non-industry setting, come learn how our team has evolved to become powerhouses of collaboration and productivity.

Sustainable, successful agile adoption initiatives require staff members’ contribution, buy-in, and commitment to continuous process improvement. But what if the culture doesn’t encourage people to speak up, take initiatives or contribute. What they are afraid of experimentation and failure. This report describes a new and creative collaborative approach for agile adoption in which all staff members take part in a tradeshow like event to gather ideas and solicit buy-in regarding the customization of practices and processes to make agile work without the excuse “that it won’t work here”.

Agile principles are universal so why shouldn’t they apply to embedded software development? They do, but the translation to practices leaves enough gaps to trip up embedded practitioners. For instance the concept of iteration zero is too simple for embedded development, where it can take several iterations to do tooling, discovery and other initial groundwork. What else?

Lessons learned in our first execution of a “program” while adopting agile practices. Key insights about communication, leadership and executive support for this 4 year, $15 million program consisting of 9 inter-related projects covering business process re-engineering, restructuring one division of the company, converting from paper files to electronic content management, setting up an operational data store, building a system to automate new workflows, introduce the use of analytic models as part of the workflow, and creating appropriate training for all the releases.

Agile has many uses in project recoveries. However, time constraints do not allow top-down implementation. Employing the processes for reporting, resource dedication, team structure, and customer relationship require buy-in at the company’s highest levels. Constraints also preclude quelling the stakeholder’s fears through formal education or pilots. The turn-around becomes the education. It is the project manager’s skill at building trust that allows introduction of different practices. This presentation will cover numerous methods of attaining trust and identifying the useful tools.

There are many sources of information about agile adoption in an enterprise environment. However, I have not found similar material focusing on the challenges present at smaller companies. This is the story of agile adoption at a small, organic growth, enterprise SaaS software company. We will discuss what problems we were experiencing before adopting agile, what problems we experienced during adoption, and what problems we are still experiencing. During the story we will also touch on what we did to address these problems, both successfully and unsuccessfully.

Acquiring any skill through instruction and experience (e.g. flying a plane, practicing yoga, or developing software using agile) involves progressing through common stages of learning. Understanding those stages, the behaviours people (and teams) exhibit at each stage, and how to effectively coach toward the next stage, is crucial for anyone tasked with assisting a team’s agile transition. We will present the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition, its 5 common learning stages as applied to agile transition, and coaching advice for each stage based on their common observable behaviours.

You’re trying to do Agile & it isn’t really taking. You are running into problems at various levels, from naysayers on teams all the way up to C-level execs. At your company, everything is a “top priority” & frequent interruptions are the norm.

Explaining “who does what when” is complicated, & there is no clear answer on how to simplify that story. Most meetings you attend are a waste of time in your view. You know Agile is part of the solution, but the results so far are NOT good.

You ask yourself: What steps can we can take now that are quick, cheap & effective?

By making IT a separate department and viewing it as a cost center there is a big divide within companies. Agile tries to cross the chasm and in the end can only fail. It is solving the wrong problem with the right solution. The chasm shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Business has gotten IT-savvy and understands the role of IT. The pool of tech wizards doing their magic is still needed, but as an essential part of the business, not a supplier or even partner.

Process Increments, is an iterative approach to manage process improvement projects. This approach builds upon Agile values and principles, and reuses some well known Agile techniques. It partitions the scope into user-story-like increments, and manages the project using agile estimating and planning techniques.

This approach has been applied to five enterprises transitioning from individual-driven/non-structured organization to a team-work/structured organization. The study shows sustained improvement velocity, good project visibility, and on-going learning experiences by project teams.