Chapter 8. Injecting agility into your current process
Failure at an organizational level seems to come from the inability to customize processes and make them their own. Trying to apply someone else’s template to your organization directly doesn’t work well. It leaves out too many important details of the previous successes and ignores your company’s specific situation. Rubber-stamping agile processes is not agile. The value of having a principle-based process is that you can apply the principles for an individualized process for your situation and, as an extra bonus, one that has been designed to adapt from your learning as you adopt changes into your organization. It is always “custom.”
—Kent Beck in a 2006 interview with InfoQ.come>
Custom means that you start with a waterfall process, Scrum, or a homegrown methodology, but you modify and enhance the process to obtain the best results for your company. You need to have a process that recognizes your unique challenges and constraints.
We’ve worked with many companies that have been successful with this approach. It brings agility into your organization iteratively, which reduces risk and provides time for employees to acclimate to an agile culture.