I’ve been compiling notes over the years with thoughts and ideas about how I could contribute to the Agile community and try to give back just a small slice compared to what I’ve taken from it.
I decided recently to write a white-paper that describes the experience of the success of a pilot Agile team within a large enterprise organization. What I hope to accomplish by writing this are:
- show that we are “breaking” some of the rules, but are experiencing success
- show the challenges large organizations have adopting Agile
- show the mistakes I made, the ramifications and how we forged ahead
- show that motivation is the most important factor in Agile adoption
How I’m going to structure the white-paper:
- Introduction: who I am, context around why I took the approach I did and context around the organization. The company name, projects and people names will be fictitious but the tactics, results and experiences will be real.
- Iteration by iteration: Starting at iteration zero and moving through our 6 iterations for 1 release I’ll show what our iterations looked like, what activities we did, how we co-ordinated with other groups, team frustrations and successes.
- Summary of what we learned: How the team felt moving from old status quo to new status quo and why they would never go back to “the old way”. This will also include what the team is planning to do for the next release in an attempt to show that despite the success, they recognize they are “not done” implementing Agile and want to get better.
- Reflection: What I learned, what I would differently next time.
- When will it be done? End of December
- How many pages? 10 pages tops, I would like to keep it concise
This is my first white-paper, I’m excited and nervous all at the same time, but this is taking me out of my comfort zone and it is quite challenging. I welcome your input and feedback regarding what you would hope to get from reading this white-paper when it’s finished.