The Issues Agile Exposes and What To Do about Them

Before the short iterations in agile, projects were segmented into large blocks of work taking many weeks or months. If problems emerged, it was relatively easy to hide them. Now, with agile, many of these problems and issues can’t be hidden for long. Lee Copeland exposes these issues—trust, organization, work, measurement, and change—and explores solutions. Leaders often distrust their teams; teams often distrust their leaders. Learn the symptoms and solutions to these trust issues. A key organizational issue is that organizations cannot give up their previous team structures. Explore your options. Work issues include our continued inability to estimate well, and our ongoing attempts to define all requirements up front. What can you do? Most organizations still have ineffective or dysfunctional metrics programs. Discover what works better. And learn why change is so difficult to accomplish—and uncover the little-known secret to change. It involves letting go.