As my first official post on the Borland blog, I thought it would help to first introduce myself. My name is Beth Williams, and have over ten years experience as an IT consultant, helping a number of companies ranging from British Telecom to Getronics to improve their IT organisations through the adoption of process and tools. In recent years, I’ve worked as both a scrum masterand agile mentor providing guidance on how to apply agile methods in seemingly “non-agile” environments. All this whilst also performing the daily activities of a certified scrum master.
This may sound easy but consider the challenges involved when your scrum team is not collocated or not 100% resourced to the project. How do you plan a sprint and what happens when no-one can physically attend stand-ups? What if your customer insists on a more traditional PM methodology like RUP but your team has been agile for years? How do you bridge the reporting gap?
In this blog, I hope to share my real life experiences of helping organisations transition to agile, the compromises that sometimes need to be made and the “tricks of the trade” that have helped teams become agile in the hardest of circumstances.
The question then becomes why bother going agile if the environment is hostile?
Because it works! It’s the most realistic way of managing the delivery of “anything” that I have ever worked with. I hope you also notice I’m not limiting this to just software delivery - agile can work for any set of deliverables. It’s all about knowing when to be pragmatic.
Comments