In the same way that Agile approaches
protect the organization from the risk of large upfront commitments, they also
do not require a large upfront commitment from the organization in order to be
used.
Agile approaches are not highly
regimented management structures that require hundreds of staff to attend
workshops (and receive doorstops of documentation) before they can be used in
the organization. You can immediately apply many of the core Agile approaches
(and principles) described in this book to your current business activities, without
attending week-long training courses, acquiring mounds of manuals, or enlisting
the services of high-end consulting firms.
That is not to say that organizations
cannot benefit from more formal guidance on adopting and applying Agile approaches.
The IT industry, for example, has benefited greatly by having formal training
and certification courses to teach people how to more effectively apply Agile methods
(such as Scrum) in their software development projects. As the adoption of
Agile approaches grows and matures in your organization, you can refine your
use of Agile by enlisting qualified consultants, attending training courses and
reading industry-specific resources, such as those listed in the Bibliography.
Equally, Agile approaches do not require
a significant upfront commitment from internal and external stakeholders. For
Agile approaches to succeed, stakeholders minimally need to be available to
guide and review the outputs of each iteration. Generally, this is no more than
eight hours of their time each iteration (i.e. every two to four weeks). Their
active involvement throughout the delivery process can substantially reduce the
time that is normally required of them at the end of the process to address
problems in the deliverables that they received. All of this can make trialing
Agile approaches in an organization a cost-contained activity, which the organization
can opt to extend (or reduce) without having jeopardized a significant upfront
investment. The downside, of course, is that employees will not have the
opportunity to bury their “certificates of completion” for the latest cure-all management
trend in the mounds of paperwork on their desks, but that is a risk that most
organizations will happily absorb.
Source of Information : IT Governance Publishing-Agile Productivity Unleashed 2010
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