Agile Adoption in Risk-Averse Environments

Adopting agile development methods in a conservative environment can be a daunting and time-consuming venture, facing resistance at all levels of the organization. You may wonder: Will this organization ever get with the times? Will our leaders ever change their way of thinking? Brian Duncan shares personal experiences and lessons learned in bringing an agile development mindset to two distinct organizations—a bottom-line product-driven software development organization, and the conservative, risk-averse Space Department at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Sharing the Good (what worked well), the Bad (what set us back), and the Ugly (what we had to abandon), Brian shows how to bring a slow-to-change organization into the forward-thinking agile methods of today. He presents practical approaches (adoption committees, grassroots techniques) and creative endeavors (free classes, an innovation lab) along with their impact on the organization. With persistence and a multifaceted approach, even risk-averse organizations can adopt agile.