Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World

How to Get There

It would be easy to read all this and have several reactions. Discouragement: Our company will never work like that. Disbelief: That would never work for us. Fear: If we did half of this, our company would fall apart or go out of business. These reactions are all valid and there is often a core of truth to them. But, if you look at the history of most companies, their evolution has taken place incrementally, not in giant steps. The path to an internalized, Agile-inspired approach is no different. Setting up a new working team to plan and launch a complete reorganization of the company and its working processes is likely doomed to failure. That's like applying the waterfall approach we are trying to avoid to the problem of our internal processes. A better approach is to apply the Agile iterative, incremental approach to ourselves.

• Take small steps.

• Encourage innovation in a tangible way.

• Provide specific positive feedback and support.

• Decide where you can reduce unneeded documentation.

• Encourage direct communication between disparate working teams.^[58]

• Ask yourself what you can do to make your product development more iterative. Do you already do one major release and 10 bug fix releases? You might already be more iterative than you think.

Experiment, Experiment, Experiment

The key point is that companies, like people, are all different. You have to find what will work for your company and for the people who work there. There is not a perfect golden mean; methods are not ...