One Size Doesn't Fit All

To listen to many Agile methodology trainers and coaches, you'd think there is a simple formula you need to follow to optimize your teams and declare success.

This has not been my experience.

Don't get me wrong. The standard, by-the-book implementations of approaches like Scrum, Kanban and SAFe are very good starting points. In fact, if you start there and are very honest and introspective about what is and is not working well, if you are continually open to change based on objective success and subjective feedback from the team, management and stakeholders, you can work your way to a fairly optimal process implementation.

Unfortunately, I have seen instances of executive management and PMOs insist that all of the teams in some fairly large companies adopt the same processes in exactly the same way. They then measure the teams adherence to those processes and define success to be non-variance. 

Every team has different strengths, weaknesses, preferences and constraints. Given this, I think it would be surprising if the exact same process implementation was optimal for all of them.

Some aspects that might impact the optimal process include:

• Stability of the team's backlog/priorities
  
• Local vs. distributed team members
• Affinity across the team assignments
• Quality of the stories
• Integration level of testing and test development
• Stakeholder satisfaction
• Management comfort empowering the team
• Maturity of the team
• ...and many more

Examining and thinking through these and other factors can point to optimizations for your team that deviate from the canonical approaches. We will examine some of these factors in future blog posts.

You can certainly determine these optimizations on your own. But if you'd like some assistance without making a big commitment in time or money, Apex Agile is here to help.

--Mike Ries