1. Management Level
Executive and senior management commitment and support is critical for adopting agile. Key management concerns that must be addressed include:
• Predictability — Traditional managers like to work within predictable environ-ments that allow them to outline detailed requirements, plan a complete project, forecast the budget and manage resources. Agile keeps their focus on the delivery of value to the customer, rather than strict compliance to a rigorous set of procedures, and it values inventiveness and innovation over predictability and unchanging processes.
• Extensive Time Commitment — Managers must be prepared to accept and sponsor the intensive level of collaboration and involvement that agile methods require. They may have to forgo written status reports in exchange for the daily stand-up meeting.
• Resources Management — Instead of being task managers, they must be ready to trust their project teams to be self-directed, and to tolerate a bit more resource risk as they discover which team members are prepared to take the leap to agile approaches.
• Risk Management — Managers must prepare to accept the reality of project uncertainty, risk and cost, and abstain from arbitrary schedules and budgets, self-delusive "happy talk" or unrealistic "death-march" styles of management.
• Metrics and Measurements — Managers have to accept that the traditional ideas of success and failure will be transformed in an agile environment. Success will not be measured by compliance to plan or strict change control. Instead it will be measured by the outputs delivered by the project teams. In case of earned value management, credit will be given for the products, features and functions delivered and not by the tasks completed by the project teams.
2. The Team Level
Teams that harbour misconceptions that agile teams do not plan, cannot estimate, do not document and cannot scale can be significant impediments to any agile migration. A central tenet of the agile movement is the requirement for highly skilled developers. Since agile teams are expected to be small, self-governing and self-regulated, there is a high expectation in regard to the personal attributes of team members — they should enjoy the special challenges of working in an agile environment, be prepared to forego personal recognition in favour of team accomplishment and enjoy working in a highly transparent environment in which their work products, creativity and diligence are visible to their teammates and customers.
3. The Stakeholder/Customer Level
The trepidations that customers and stakeholders express include the fear that scope will lurch out of control. They will lose the traditional signposts of progress on which they have come to rely, and estimates of time and cost will not be available to help them allocate budget and staff. They also convey unique concerns, such as the agile requirement for intense collaboration and constant availability, and its affect on their own workload. Sales and management teams may express concerns about "account management" as customer representatives are integrated into agile teams.