Overcoming Three Pitfalls of Transitioning to Agile

Overcoming Three Pitfalls of Transitioning to Agile

Johanna RothmanNew: Hiring Geeks That Fitwww.jrothman.com@[email protected]

781-641-4046

© 2013 Johanna Rothman2

Three Common Pitfalls to Agile Transition

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1. Stories too big for the iteration

2.“We need an expert!”

3. Implementation across the architecture, not through it

© 2013 Johanna Rothman

“The Iteration is Too Short” akaThe Stories are Too Big

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We can’t get anything done in 2 weeks



...

Stories are humungous

What do you do?


Strategies for “Stories are too Big”

Swarm around stories

What’s the first thing you can do

that adds business value?

Shorten the iterations

Use kanban so you can see the

flow of features through the

teams and see bottlenecks

(visualize where things are)

Stop estimating; Start delivering

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Experts are Rampant

“I’ll take this story. John will take that story. Dan takes this

story.”

“We need an expert for that story.”

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Strategies for “We Need Experts”

Never let the expert work alone

Pair the expert with another person

Pair other people together

Banish the expert and let the team

manage the problem

Stagger the projects to use the expert

Hire more experts

Understand why you have this problem

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Implementation Through the Architecture

An artifact of component-based organization

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Stay in Touch?

Upcoming book: Agile and Lean Program Management:

Collaborating Across the Organization on leanpub

Much more on jrothman.com

www.jrothman.com/pragmaticmanager

www.jrothman.com/blog/mpd

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Overcoming Three Pitfalls of Transitioning to Agile

Technology

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