Every organization is different than any other organization operating in the world. Organization has its own way of doing things, has unique culture, management philosophy, work structure, existing knowledge and experience with agile methodologies and very unique set of problems. Considering the aspects that unique to the organization agile concepts and activities should be emphasized.

Here are the five quick steps for agile adoption.

1. Educate the organization:

Know more about agile methodology. Educate everybody related, especially those who will be the part of initial rollout. Make everybody go through a training session on agile irrespective of their knowledge about agile. This will help them develop real understanding of the key concepts in agile.

2. Pick the project:

After everybody is having good understanding about agile concepts and are on the same platform, the agile project can get started. As this would be the first agile project, risks have to be addressed at this level as soon as possible to ensure success for both project and success. The criteria for selecting the project needs to include the solution’s level of complexity, visibility, resources and integrations.

3. Execute the project:

After selecting the project based on selected criteria the team who is going to be engaged for the project has to be educated if it was not the part of earlier training session. Do the project kickoff by explaining the methodology, roles, responsibilities, timeline and deliverables. Instead of ‘scope’ think in terms of backlog, feature negotiations, the sprints, scrum meetings, demos etc.

After the completion of sprint do retrospection and try to learn and improve in next sprint.

4. Review the project:

Review the project that you just complete and note the learning that will refine other processes and projects. The process improvement will involve support functions and project execution teams. To run agile projects at the expected speed it is important that support functions responds quickly to the project sprint requirements. The processes have to evolve, which might take some time, at organizational level to support agile development projects addressing any process level conflicts.

5. Redo the steps:

IT industry is cursed with high attrition than any other industry and hence you will need to constantly train new people on agile concepts and methodologies. This will bring everybody within organization at the same level of agile approach. When you move agile concept deeper into the organization you will find yourself managing change at every level within organization. The change is difficult and you as an agile proponent will have to make it acceptable because agile is beneficial for dynamic projects, which is the need of the time.

Be realistic and good luck with your agile implementation!