Brent Sordyl's blog

A few lessons I've learned along the (hard) way:

1. The best way to achieve your goal is to start with the right people
2. If you’ve found the right people, let them get on with the job you’re paying them for
3. The people with the best ability to plan the delivery are the people doing the work
4. A small team with a manageable backlog needs very little Project Management
5. Everyone on the team “needs to know”.

A few things that help this happen on a practical level:

1. Try and avoid building towards a pre-determined marketing / launch date
2. If you do have a fixed time, then scope is variable
3. Never try messing around with team sizes to massage delivery
4. Automate everything in sight – builds, deployments, testing, progress reporting, tea-making
5. Measure as much as you can – no feedback == no direction

And finally some other things that will prevent you from getting there:

1. If you have to have everything on your requirements list, you can’t be agile
2. If you need to plan beyond the next sprint with any degree of accuracy, you’re not agile
3. If you think you can “fix” an iteration by adding more people, you’re not agile
4. If you are prepared to change the end date of an iteration to “fit something in”, you’re not agile
5. If you have to give a fixed date for delivery – it’s very, very difficult to be agile.