Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

One Project at a Time

Now that you have whole, dedicated teams, you need to focus them on one project at a time and not disrupt them until the project is done.³ This means you need to prioritize your work. What’s the most important project? Is it the new release? Or is it the maintenance release? Or is it something else? Whatever the list of projects is, prioritize the list and put the team on the highest-priority project. When done, have them move to the next project on the list. If multitasking is wasteful at an individual level, then it’s also wasteful at an organizational level. One thing at a time, one thing at a time, one thing at a time....

3. Of course, common sense applies here. If you discover partway through a project that it is no ...