A Pilot to see where we are going

When looking to setting up an Agile pilot we need to do some end-to-end thinking. Agile trials are
often small teams set up to test the Agile principles, the purpose of which is to provide evidence
that Agile should be considered for a larger roll-out. So we take a group of people and train them,
then set them off on some part of a project to see how this could work in our company.

But how do we set their goals for them? These are the user stories that feed the team with work to
do. OK great; who writes these user stories? The team is not able to, nor should
they. A product owner must be part of the pilot to connect to the business and customer. If the team takes its requirement from the same source as the non-Agile portion of the project,
then are the user stories ready? Indeed are they even user stories? Recall the old saying; garbage in, garbage out.

And what are we going to do with the result? Who is receiving the work that is done?
Agile pilots need an Agile thread from end-to-end. The practice of creating a pilot Agile team in the
middle of a non-Agile delivery project has limitations. The team is starved of good “scrum food” and
often has an “impedance mismatch” for the results of their work. The pilot needs three things (At Least):

• an Agile team
• an Agile demand (requirements)
• an Agile continuous integration (Flow).

This is an end-to-end thread provided for the pilot, and it needs to exist. The implications otherwise
are that the pilot spends a good deal of time on these areas and not on development, and not on or
clear requirements. This will concludeThe result will be a conclusion that Agile is slow, doesn’t
deliver and doesn’t work in our situation. Truth is that not much Agile work was actually done. Most of the work was making the
square peg round.

So when we design our Agile pilots, let’s make sure that the team has stories that are ready, and
when done make use of continuous integration. Now, if once we have actually considered the
end-to-end environment, how do we form the team? Stay tuned.