[MrKurtHaeusler]

Good post. For me the first 3 tips, about having management backing, the right culture and the right people made me smile a bit. An analogy would be like "Here are 3 tips for being successful in business: Have a lot of capital, have a great idea, and execute it perfectly".

Normally getting management backing, developing the right culture, and having the right people are huge, difficult topics in themselves that are much larger and more fundamental than how a team decides to develop software.

If anything it goes the other way around. In order to get management support the team should first start doing agile and proving that it works. Having the right culture is a long term thing. Agile software development is a mere step in that direction as far as developing software goes. If anything agile software development helps the right culture emerge rather than the right culture being a prerequisite for agile software development.

And if you truly have the right people you don't need to to worry about agile, you are already doing so well that agile will only slow you down. Agile is probably ideal for larger organisations who unfortunately don't have the "right" people and need a framework or something to help them along. Once people get competent enough, "agile" just starts to feel dogmatic and restrictive. I mean they will still do the practices that make sense, but they aren't going to appreciate other aspects of buying into a whole "agile" approach.

I would also caution against "passing the change baton to higher ups". I have seen all the hard work undone when a fairly agile software development department decided to combine with the product department and include them in the change management process. The idea was to spread agility outwards, but because the product department had mostly more extroverted, managerial types they took control of the decision making (I was surprised how easily the software developers ceded control and retreated into a yes boss mentality) and their command and control culture swamped over any agility we had in the dev department.

[adrianhoward]

And if you truly have the right people you don't need to to worry about agile, you are already doing so well that agile will only slow you down. Agile is probably ideal for larger organisations who unfortunately don't have the "right" people and need a framework or something to help them along. Once people get competent enough, "agile" just starts to feel dogmatic and restrictive. I mean they will still do the practices that make sense, but they aren't going to appreciate other aspects of buying into a whole "agile" approach.

When you say "[Aa]gile" here are you talking about a particular process (Scrum? XP?) or something else? I can't really understand the intent - especially since in my experience agile works better with smaller organisations than large ones.