In what environments will Agile be most successful?

Let me try and answer your question by putting some thoughts on the aspects of Agile:

1)      High Customer Involvement (Customer also needs to understand what is involved in Agile kind of a work)

2)      Availability of Subject Matter Experts – This would be a challenge.

3)      Automation using tools and portals

4)      The backbone of a successful implementation of Agile is automation of the tasks – especially those related to testing and creating builds. The tools that could be used from the automation perspective are:

a.       Wiki

b.      Subversion

c.       And a tool for Continuous Integration Server/System to integrate check in/out, report errors, etc

5)      Strict decorum needs to be maintained to ensure that there are NO silos and the knowledge sharing can be improved by implementing team rotation

6)      The team composition is to have poly-skilled folks which indicates – not just jack of all trades, but very good jack of all trades. Which would bring out the dynamics involved in getting the right talent.

7)      The stress is on minimum use of emails during and within the project as the team would be on “high” verbal/vocal communication mode, sitting close to each other

8)       “EGO” would play the spoiler role in teams which could lead to the disruption of the agile way of working

9)      Some anti-patterns or things which have led to the misnomer on Agile:

a.       The team who are to execute the agile project are to have understood how agile works. The combination of one master and rest of them with no knowledge in the team about agile will NOT work and could lead to the misnomer that Agile is not successful

b.      Selection of the project for Agile is also an important factor. Organizations; to start with should be willing to take risk in identifying projects that actually has some business value and not select projects that are initiated with little business value. This could lead to the low importance of Agile and could lead to teams not having the right focus.

c.       Ideally, the projects that have high business value, narrow schedule/Time to Market, and one that has volatile requirements would be best suited for Agile kind of projects.

10)   Offshore/Distributed Agile –for distributed teams two factors that are important are:

a.       Having a common integrated system in place for testing etc

b.      Having a common Stand-up meeting between teams

11)   Some new terms that I have seen:

a.       Concurrent Engineering – An alternative term for Peer Programming

b.      Serendipitous Communication – An alternative description for Stand-up Meeting where every one would get the opportunity to add to the value of the project and business of the project.

12)   Metrics – “Team Velocity”. Team velocity is one metric that makes sense in capturing apart from effort and schedule. Basically, it is the capture of productivity of the team.

13)   Estimation and Benchmarking are not perfected for Agile and could be a major challenge.

14)   Documentation: Minimum Documentation – does not mean that processes are not followed. Here the processes are system driven and everyone would have to adhere to it. If the team has SMEs, they would understand the impact and importance of following the process even though there are less documentation available.

Hope this helps in understanding the various scenarios/challenges where Agile can be applied.