A lot of the success of agile development teams relies heavily on consensus based decision making. In fact, the success of most teams in general, agile or not, is based on the same thing. However, I think there is a big misconception out there about what consensus is. In short, consensus doesn’t mean that everyone is in agreement. What it means is that everyone can live with something and support it. And if you’re doing agile and keeping your iterations to two weeks, it means you can live with and support the decision for the next two weeks. Then it can be revisited.  Read the rest of this post

While at Where 2.0, Dave Bouwman and I did a podcast with Jesse and Sue over at Very Spatial.  We spoke about a recent project we completed for the Wildlife Conservation Society for their Global Avian Influenza Network for Surveillance (GAINS) project.  The mapping application was a Virtual Earth implementation which showed locations and information of bird flu cases around the world, as well as related flyways for those species.  We also talked a little bit about how we used agile practices to deliver the application very quickly and with complete customer satisfaction.  If you want to check out the podcast, head over to Very Spatial.  If you’d like to take a look at the application, check it out the WCS GAINS website.  And, if you’re interested in more of the technical details, check out Dave’s recent post about building the application.  Read the rest of this post

I recently had someone pose a question to me that got me thinking about the scalability of agile success.  Here was the question: “I’m part of large organization of over 1,000 people.  Our small team of 40 has been using agile with a great deal of success.  Now our company wants to me to extrapolate the successes we’ve enjoyed from agile (efficiency, value, profitability) to the rest of the company.  Do you think the agile success of 40 people can be extrapolated to over 1,000 people?”  Read the rest of this post

Lately I’ve been hearing feedback from lots of different people that they’ve “adopted” agile and it’s just not working for them.  This always causes me to pause, step back and ask a few questions.  Here’s the list that usually runs through my head:  How did your company adopt agile: top down mandate or grown organically?  Was your adoption done in stealth mode or full fledged “Hello world, we’re going agile”? Do you have real executive support for your agile adoption? What kind of projects have you implemented agile on: fixed price, fixed scope, fixed schedule? Has your staff received any kind of agile training? How many projects have you run in an agile manner? How long ago did you start doing agile?  Read the rest of this post