Best Practices From Expert Agile Firms

We gleaned most of the must-dos from the best practices and successes of expert
Agile firms. But
even the experts still have room for improvement, so we added lessons from our
experience and work
with clients, vendors, and other experts over the years to offer these tips (see
Figure 3, see Figure 4,
and see Figure 5):
1. Change the organization�s mindset. Agile and Lean require a mindset shift that
gets rid of old
behaviors consolidated over years of waterfall development. Agile organizations
value collaboration,
communication, transparency, and delivering business value more than binding plans
and rigid
governance of fixed costs, effort, and deadlines. Expert firms focus on these
values and principles
and face fewer impediments when they try to replicate Agile practices across the
organization, fewer
challenges in introducing new behavior in teams, and faster achievement of true
Agile leadership.
How to do it: Cultural change is hard. Knowing the Lean and Agile values and
principles is only a
starting point. To make cultural change really happen, successful teams must drive
change through
actions, doing their daily work differently. For example, continuous integration
practices force
teams to check and integrate code more frequently and focus on batches and minimum
viable
products instead of large bulk releases. But making change stick is even harder!
Organizations
like Verizon have established dojos � labs where teams can fully immerse themselves
in Agile
experiences working side by side with seasoned Agile and DevOps experts.3 Concerted
use of
metrics, automation, and stronger executive Agile leadership complete the key
ingredients.