Entries by Keith Sterling

You are on your first Agile project, and you are struggling, so you decide to bring in a consultancy, one with a really shinny new website and a bunch of people who can blog for their country as an Olympic sport. They arrive in a whirlwind of new terms and behaviour, coaching your team on all things Agile, pressing the point that Test Driven Development is the way forward, showing you burn down graphs, story cards, planning poker and something called a retrospective. Unfortunately the money soon dries up, quite often well before the project does and off they trot with a hearty slap on the back, a fond farewell and that "don't worry, it will all be OK, we've coached you", look in their eye.

This uncomfortable truth happens all too often, and all too often it can leave a project in disarray, its like the first time you have the stabilisers taken off your cycle, unfortunately its more like been given the keys to Learjet after 4 lessons. You sort of get the gist, you known what you should do, but you are at 10,000 feet and an engine just blew out. Its at times like these that so many projects revert back to old ways wasting all the time and money invested in showing them there are new better ways to work.

I've seen this happen myself, quite often the customer had a limited budget and therefore when then money dries up, no amount of persuasion or convincing is going to get them to pay for more and even in these enlightened times who wants to work for free. Alternatively I've seen situations where projects managers under pressure for budgets think because its all going so well their teams must have really picked it all up and can run on their own now, so why not claw some of that money back early.

Inevitably problems occur, not big ones, but because its all new and different they often seem big at the time. So for all those currently going through some form of Agile/Lean process improvement here are a few guidelines that I have seen work well for others.

1. Don't suffer alone

You don't have to give away the company secrets, you don't even have to sign on with your company email address, but get yourself signed up for a few news groups, and forums. These are excellent sources of information with people at all skill levels willing to help out for free.

A search on Yahoo Groups or Google Groups will bring up the names of some great forums such as AgileDevelopmentManagement, extremeprogramming and scrumdevelopment, while LinkedIn has a wide range of Agile related groups such as Agile Agile & Scrum UK, Agile Alliance and extreme programmign (XP)

If you are really lucky there might be an actual Agile group in your local area, where you can meet up socially chat about problems, listen to talks from experts and generally have a shoulder to cry on ( over a beer or three ) when it gets really hard.

2. Be prepared for mistakes and learn from them

Mistakes will happen. Agile is a learning exercise that is best experienced through repeated practise. That means sometimes you'll get it wrong, but the key is not to see these as failures, but as learning points. Use the concept of retrospectives the coach would have taught you to look at why the problem occurred for your organisation and what you could try and do to ensure it doesn't happen again.

3. Continue the education

If you are paying £20,000 - £40,000 for a month or two of an Agile coach, what is £3000 for a Scrum Master or Product Owner course for 2 or three of your staff. I've seen this work well for teams that have been left on their own for a short period. The certification allows them to take along specific problems and experiences to share with the class which benefits everyone

There are also plenty of books on Agile, make sure you coach leaves you with a decent list of the best. Again £500 spent now on a good library can save you £1000's down the line.

4. Work the network

It seems that everyone these days is adopting agile, and in many ways they are, whether its hard core Agile XP or Scrum adoption, or looking at Lean process improvement, or just dabbling with better coding and testing through TDD and CI. It probably means ex-colleagues and friends in the industry are also going through the same growing pains, or may have done and have stories to share, its time to pull out that old address book, or review that LinkedIn profile and work that network.

5. Ask for support

Any good consultancy, even the single owner start ups should provide you with a level of support free of charge. If they don't you need to question why you are using them. They should at least offer to respond to email queries in a reasonable amount of time, may even provide a support forum for clients, or even a phone number to call when it gets really tough. Suffice to say any good company will not leave you abandoned and should providing a level of back up support once they leave, but make sure you check before engaging them.

6. Prepare for them leaving

This may sound stupid but in heat of all the new things Agile brings, many companies forget to plan for the next biggest event to the go live of their product and that is the consultancy leaving. In my experience the best time to plan this is during the negotiations of them starting. Just like your project has a goal, so must the enablement and this has to be planned in from day one, so that it can be measured and reported on. You never know if you achieve your goals early, there is nothing wrong with the consultancy taking any early exit !!!!, but joking aside you need to know when it is going to happen and what needs to be place when it does.