Managing the Agile Change
Since agile teams are designed to be autonomous bands of rapid change agents making critical business decisions on the fly, the once-immutable laws of project management shift dramatically. Because waterfall's typical 18-to-24-month development times are drastically reduced to two-week windows, every day of development and every conversation become critical. In Dury's IT shop, mornings start with a team huddle and a breakdown of what everyone is responsible for completing that day. "We don't need to talk about what gets done three weeks from now — this is what we want to do today," Dury says. "We don't want to lose days."
It's incumbent on CIOs to set the new expectations — teamwork, openness, collaboration — for everyone in their agile group. "There's an expectation of collaboration. You can't just go work in your own little world," says Farm Credit Services' Martin. "There's also a new visibility into the work and, in some cases, the nonwork."
Those team members who resist, however, will more than likely find themselves out of a job. (An old Persian saying seems appropriate for CIOs to remember: "The dogs bark, the caravan passes on.") Scott Ambler, an agile expert who works as practice leader for agile development at IBM, suspects that many developers, requirements analysts, and data and testing staffers are worried about agile's career-changing consequences. "They have likely worked on a slew of failures, and they often feel powerless to change things. Worse yet, they have the threat of outsourcing hanging over their heads," Ambler says.
The CIO's job is to manage the anxiety and ensure that his team focuses on producing high-grade software in a timely and cost-efficient manner. "In the agile community, the only measure of progress on a software development project is the delivery of working software," Ambler says. "The traditional development community has lost sight of that."
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