How To Fail With Agile: 20 Tips to Help You Avoid Success

Management Issues۱: Don’t trust the team or agile. Micromanage both your team members and the process
۲: If agile isn’t a silver bullet, blame agile.
۳: Equate self-managing with self-leading and provide no direction to the team whatsoever.
۴: Ignore the agile practices.
۵: Undermine the team’s belief in agile.

Team Issues
۶: Continually fail to deliver what you committed to deliver during iteration planning.
۷: Cavalierly move work forward from one iteration to the next.
۸: Do not create cross-functional teams. Put all the testers on one team, all the programmers on another, and so on.
۹: Large projects need large teams. Ignore studies that show productivity decreases with large teams due to increased communication overhead. Since everyone needs to know everything, invite all fifty people to the daily standup.

Product Owner Issues۱۰: Don’t communicate a vision for the product to the team or to the other stakeholders.
۱۱: Don’t pay attention to the progress of each iteration and objectively evaluate the value of that progress.
۱۲: Replace a plan document with a plan “in your head” that only you know.
۱۳: Have one person share the roles of ScrumMaster (agile coach) and product owner. In fact, have this person also be an individual contributor on the team

Process Issues
۱۴: Start customizing an agile process before you’ve done it by the book.
۱۵: Drop and customize important agile practices before fully understanding them.
۱۶: Slavishly follow agile practices without understanding their underlying principles
۱۷: Don’t continually improve.
۱۸: Don’t change the technical practices.
۱۹: Rather than align pay, incentives, job titles, promotions, and recognition with agile, create incentives for individuals to undermine teamwork and shared responsibility.
۲۰: Convince yourself that you’ll be able to do all requested work, so the order of your work doesn’t matter.

Reference: Mike Cohn in www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/

Qoute:
“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”
—Leonard Bernstein