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The executive makes a “vendor” or external “coach” responsible for the transition If you have handled the first risk and have defined success and success metrics, you likely will not find a vendor who will base his payment on your metrics.  After all, the metrics likely call for less project failure rate, faster response times, etc.  You probably can’t measure these things in less than a year if you really want objective metrics and not one optimized for short-term results at the expense of the longer term.  A vendor might want: # of people trained % of teams using an “agile” project management tool # of teams with an embedded “agile champion” # of successful iterations It is really easy to accomplish the above metrics and still not make any material change in the organization.  I have worked with a client that did something similar to the above.  Most of the teams starting using some new Scrummy project management web application for project tracking.  They declared that monthly status meetings were now iterations.  They declared a member of the team to be the Scrummaster (and sent that person to training).  Overall, the same organizational problems persisted.  Vendors cannot produce real change in an organization unless the organizations executive leadership alters the culture in a meaningful way.

Helicopter Managers – who step in too soon to rescue thereby depriving the team to think and solve problems together.

Absentee Managers – who would not step in at all irrespective of whether the team has all the necessary skills to tackle the problem.

If the team has sufficient skills to solve the problem then give them space else ask questions to help them get unstuck. This would help in building the skills eventually.

Institute an agile transition team, and have the agile PMO play a significant role on that team. If you are starting on the journey, establishing an agile transition team can be a critical factor in your success. The agile transition team plans and implements the strategy for the organization’s agile transition (using a backlog, iterations, planning meetings, retrospectives and, in general, responding to change) This group monitors and communicates results throughout the organization, and is responsible for removing organizational level impediments. The PMO representative can act as ScrumMaster for the agile transition team. Members should be leaders representing different departments and functions that are impacted by the agile transition. For example, having leaders from development, QA, product development and the PMO is an excellent practice.

Establish a “Meta Scrum” that is tasked with mapping projects and features to corporate strategy. As part of optimizing the whole, it is important for there to be a big picture view across products and features. In general, product managers are tasked with defining, prioritizing and communicating the vision and features for their products. When you have a program that encompasses multiple products with multiple product owners and project teams, keeping everything in line with the corporate vision can sometimes be overlooked.   Unlike the Scrum of Scrums--which is tactical, i.e. focused on execution--the Meta Scrum is focused on the strategic planning and decisions guiding the program or programs as a whole. Establishing a Meta Scrum with the PMO representative acting as ScrumMaster to plan and facilitate meetings (as well as reporting and tracking decisions and action items) can add significant value in having a program able to rapidly respond to change while staying true to the corporate strategy and objectives.

I like using story points to establish the velocity of individual teams. From a program point of view, however, story points are difficult to use across multiple teams. The nut there is that one team’s story point is not equivalent to another team’s story point. To crack that nut, I use agileEVM to “normalize” to standard project management metrics like the Cost Performance Index and the Schedule Performance Index, as well as the Estimate At Complete in integrated dollars. These metrics can be aggregated across teams to establish progress against the plan for the entire program.

Simply using iterations, user stories and velocity doesn’t mean your project is agile – or on the way to success.

why “iterations” may be hazardous to your project: ‘’Danger grows when the results of the iteration are not directly linked to delivering the product to the end user.’’ Without that linkage, iteration results hang in the air

What gets in the way is that the project is set up as a pipeline, with programming put somewhere in the middle of the pipeline. In this project setup, there is really nothing the programmers can do to show how their work connects to deliveries, because there are work stations before and after theirs. All they can report is that “some new code is integrated into the code base.” They are doing incremental development but not agile development.

I do believe for Scrum to work beyond the team you need more than Scrum

what to add to Scrum making it more effective when it won't readily work

lack of team agility is not always the major impediment to Enterprise Agility

Coaches help teams learn Agile practices get from 'Agile seems to be something we should do' to 'we are practicing Agile development and succeeding by regularly delivering business value'.

ncreasingly there are reports of initial success followed by failures with Agile adoption.

I believe that there is a problem to how current Agile coaches - especially external ones (such as the author) - have traditionally performed their jobs. In fact, I think we are part of the problem