program selection system

In March 2006, our organization began adopting agile in a small project setting. Two years later, all our software development across an IT department of 85 and a development team of about 50 is organized using agile. We’ve adopted tools, processes, and a culture that includes many of the foundations of agile, including daily stand-up meetings, weekly estimation / planning / deployments, continuous integration, and collaborative team rooms. A majority of our work is web development, but we’ve also adopted this model for our legacy systems and a PeopleSoft ERP.

I’d like to share what we’ve learned over this two year period: what works, what doesn’t work so well, and optimization choices we’ve made that help with certain things and hurt in other areas. A component of the conversation will be discussing some of the cultural challenges within the technology organization associated with providing “structure” to what was previously a chaotic software development process, as well as some of the staff-level difficulties of implementing stand-ups and team rooms. I would also like to spend some time on the challenges of communicating the value and effectiveness of agile to your business customer when not all of them are convinced that the direction is sound. Of all our challenges on the technology and process side, this is probably the biggest obstacle to the perception of success.