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I recently attended AgileDC which was co-sponsored by Three Pillar Global. The interest in the conference is indicative of the interest and challenges faced in adopting agile techniques. Nearly 200 people came to the conference which was twice the number the organizers initially estimated would attend.

One of the key messages from the conference is that agile is not just a process but a mindset. To be successful at agile development an organization needs to change its mindset. This can take 18-24 months and requires buy in from development and business stakeholders and needs several C level champions – just one champion is not enough.

An organization cannot implement scrum across the board and call itself agile. Conversely an agile organization may not necessarily use ìstandardî agile processes. It is important for an organization to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of its current processes that have come from years of business, software development and implementation successes and incorporate those with some modifications to create its own agile processes.

One of the interesting concepts was defining levels of the agile expertise within an organization.

• Following (shu)
• Breakaway (ha)
• Fluent (ri)

An organization starts in the shu (following) stage. In this stage they follow standard processes – for example, using Scrum.

Once they gain confidence in following a methodology they reach the ha (breakway) stage in which they can determine where they can deviate from the methodology in certain narrow cases.

Some will make the transition to the ri (fluent) stage where they actually develop their own agile processes that are customized to their business and operating structure. This is where the real benefits of agile development are realized.

There are different ways to get to the ri stage, but most speakers were in agreement that it took 18-24 months to make the organizational shift to get there. There are different patterns of agile adoption:

• Little Footprint – one project at a time
• Big Footprint – several projects at once
• Pillar – management mandate across organization
• Osmosis – grassroots movement from development teams

Switching gears a bit to distributed agile which was a hot topic because organizations are going global not only to reduce costs which were the initial impetus a decade ago, but also to take advantage of the global talent pool.

At Three Pillar Global we develop products for product companies ñ our engagements are varied and range from green field development to project rescues in a wide spectrum of business domains. The common denominator across all our engagements is a need to release early and often to enable our clients to accelerate revenue generation and gain market share.

The agile methodology with its emphasis on short release cycles, iterative development, tight feedback loops, and close communication between business owners and developers closely meshes in with our delivery needs.

However, Three Pillars is a global product delivery organization with development centers in the US, India, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

The core tenets of agile are closely knit (and in most cases co-located) multidisciplinary teams of business owners and developers, very high level of informal face-to-face communications, very light (JIT) requirements and design documentation with a focus on getting to coding very early.

Can these be work in a global delivery model?

The answer is yes, but only by adapting the ìclassic agileî model to the challenges posed by distributed development. Over the years we have gone through a learning process as described earlier on in the article and learned several lessons on the practices that work in a distributed environment and those that need modification.

I presented several best practices that we had created for distributed agile development at the conference. There was a lot of interest because several attendees had encountered challenges in implementing agile practices in a distributed environment.

I will be presenting these practices in an upcoming blog article.