Wow. You posted nearly 200 bits of advice in response to the contest to provide your one best tip for “succeeding with agile.” Everybody here is wonderful and we generated a pile of great advice for anyone stumbling across the post. I feel like I could just print the comments page and have a whole new book out of it.
I promised to pick my favorite bit of advice and one random winner. Well, picking just one with so many responses was impossible so I picked two favorites and two random winners. Each winner will receive a copy of Succeeding with Agile, my newest book.
Our first winner is Gabe Brown who said
Scrum is like a mirror, use it like one and see your product and your team for what it really is, not what you think it is. It’ll transform the way you think about building anything.
I love that. I often give this same message to the teams I coach but I don’t say it as well as Gabe did.
Our second winner is Michal Slocinski who said:
My advice is to blur boundaries between developers and testers (this is classic example but applies to all roles) as much as possible. Everyone on the team has to understand that success will come only if people will collaborate without “us and them” mindset.
Yes, yes, yes. We need to blur the boundaries between all roles. What a great way of saying this. We don’t need to get rid of the boundaries (not everyone needs to be a generalist) but we need to blur those boundaries.
I also had my assistant pick two random winners (using the temperature of my CPU at the moment she picked to seed the random number generator). Our winners there are Edson Yanaga and Gerry Kirk.
Please stay tuned. This was so much I’ve got another good idea and we’ll do another contest shortly.
