The Big Projects Always Fail: Taking an Enterprise Agile

My overall approach to software development has been to decompose large efforts into smaller, tractable components, and to fail fast when things appear to be heading in the wrong direction. Though not a particularly unusual model, I have been able to road-test it over eight years of agile experience, including a stint at DaimerChrysler on an extreme programming (XP) team that included some of the members of the original C3 payroll project. This pattern has been a keystone of our direction at the technology division of Entertainment Publications, where we began our agile transformation about two years ago. Though it was originally a small pilot with an unspecified roll-out plan, we now use an agile approach for all our software development and support. This paper highlights the lessons we´ve learned in the process - some items for you to either avoid or embrace.