Adopting Agile Practices: Its going to be hard!
Right now I'm coaching some teams with projects in flight. To do this I generally start by showing them one or two agile practices. After getting buy-in we use the practices for an iteration - retrospect and refine. This approach minimizes change and risk to the project, but has a drawback. A gradual approach lends to some quick successes early on that give a false impression that adopting agile practices is going to be easy. As more complicated practices are incrementally adopted a tipping point is reach upon which the team has a cathartic moment. They discover that: The practices they are learning are actually a means to an end. Once they master a practice they are embarking on a journey rather than achieved a tick mark for a resume or PMO process requirement. What got them through the last few iterations isn't working on the current iteration. Any impediments to project success quickly bubble to the top and wildly boil over. These can be external issues or a team me