"Can we do agile?" is a question individuals often ask as they look at the impressive results reported by other organizations that have adopted agile practices. Their usual concerns are about the commonly perceived barriers to agile adoption: large scale, legacy architecture, tooling; and demanding governance and compliance practices. Many organizations with these challenges do agile very well despite these perceived barriers. Others wonder why, even with their training and shiny new tools, they can't do agile. What they're not seeing are the social barriers that impede fast decisions and ultimately doom many agile adoption programs. Steve Adolph explains why social factors are the dominant determinant of agile success, introduces a fast decision cycle model to resolve issues, and provides a configuration guide to help you identify and evaluate social impediments. Using a case study of a "high ceremony" organization, you and Steve work together to find ways to resolve your company's impediments to doing agile.
An agile coach with Blue Agility and cofounder of e-learning publisher Development Knowledge, Steve Adolph pursues his passion for helping organizations get the job done. Steve has been creating and managing software development projects long enough to remember FORTRAN and PDP-11s. His professional career includes many exciting and critical projects—designing call processing software for digital telephone exchanges, design and development of leading edge network management systems, railway signaling, and telecom billing. Coauthor of Patterns for Effective Use Cases, Steve has diverse job experience—from developer to chief engineer to CTO.