Your Challenge: •The Agile evangelists are having trouble converting others to the Agile philosophy. •Your team is facing pressure to deliver projects in a smaller time frame. The Waterfall approach is causing projects to go over budget, misunderstanding of project owners’ expectations, and late delivery to the end-customer. •Projects that get implemented successfully may be susceptible to problems as the software gets older and crucial changes are too expensive. •A consolidation roadmap that is based on an easy-to-implement method will ease the burden on resource and infrastructure maintenance. Our Advice: Critical Insight: •Agile is not suitable for all organizations, or all projects. Carefully select pilot projects that have the greatest chance of success and determine the right requirements or risk significant cost overruns to fix problems or roll back development. •An Agile rollout may require peripheral projects to be accelerated. •Agile will modify internal roles and processes. Get ready for change management. Impact and Result: •Agile will improve communication and transparency between teams and stakeholders, which will lead to higher quality products and fluid team dynamics. •The success of the Agile pilot should be used to build the case for an organizational-wide deployment. •In order for your organization to stay competitive, it must place focus on delivering projects at a quicker pace with the right features.

1. Implement Agile Practices that Work
Deliver on time and improve communication with the business to minimize project failure
App Dev Managers are under increasing pressure to perform more, with less time available to reach markets.
Currently 40% of development teams are using tradition waterfall techniques that fail to adapt to continuous change as there is no
feedback or inspection process implemented throughout the development cycle.
Quality issues are not realized until the end of the project because testing is not integrated throughout the lifecycle and there is no
regular inspection of the working product.
Costs and efforts significantly increases as bugs and defects are found and fixed later in the lifecycle.
The final product does not meet stakeholder’s expectations because there is no visibility of the product to key stakeholders until the
end of the development process.
This scenario will result in the loss of business buy-in, leading to the increased probability of rejection.
Projects often go over budget because it is not easy to respond to change in demands, especially with fixed budgets.
Agile Practices Address the Number One Cause of Project Failure
Poor communication is a leading cause of project failures. Agile offers the ability to clarify communication processes in the form of easy-to-
use, mix and match practices.
- *Source: Rosencrance, Linda. Survey: Poor communication causes most IT project failures. Computerworld, 2007.
Embrace Agile to reduce churn and effectively react to change in requirements
Agile facilitates change and allows the development team to change direction every iteration. The cost of change is low and it provides an
opportunity for the customer to reassess the features for inclusion in the current iteration based on value and business ROI.

9. http://www.infotech.com/research/ss/implement-agile-practices-that-work