What Makes Agile Teams Succeed (or Fail)? - Agile Coach Camp

Greetings,

This is the first of a two sessions that I facilitated at Agile Coach Camp. A small group of agile coaches, including Ron Jefferies came together on Saturday to consider the question "What makes agile teams succeed (or Fail)?" Using the Group Wisdom Without Groupthink process, we generated, discussed, and ranked about a dozen ideas.

Compared to previous groups that I have facilitated this type of session for, there was more discussion around each of the suggestions. The names we chose to represent the ideas, which are listed below, each stand for a richer idea that the group developed.

Here are the top-ranked ideas that the group generated:

Tier One
Have motivated people

Tier Two
Manage by (carefully chosen) objectives

Tier Three
Communication
Disciplined use of best practices

Tier Four
Don't time slice your people

Tier Five
Don't automate process until they are well understood
Don't have multiple product owners with overlapping authority
Great story cards

You may also be interested in seeing the results from groups that have considered (essentially) the same question:
BayAPLN
Chicago Scrum Gathering
P-Camp 2008
Code Camp 2007
Agile Open California 2007

Cheers,

Chris

Comments

[Yong Lim]

Hi Chris,

Interesting topics, wish I had attended this one.
What does the different tiers signify?
Does it mean that tier one is more important or less important than tier 2?

Yong Lim

[Chris Sims]

Greetings,

The tiers represent the ordering, in terms of importance, that the group arrived at.

Cheers,

Chris