As an external consultant, you don’t always get to pick your customers. Sometimes Sales has sold your services without you even knowing about it. This can result in some rather pointless agile transformations where there is no appetite for change. However, sometimes you hit gold. Sometimes people really want to change things – and you do get to make a difference. I had one team where we started off with the product owner and the testers in one building and the development in another one – 15 minutes away by foot. And we were doing “Scrum”. Not.

However, I had a very receptive partner on the business side, who really wanted to do an agile project. So, in what was a first in recent times, the Product Owner and the testers moved into the same building on the same floor as the developers. This led to an exponential increase in the quality of their communication with each other. We worked hard on eliminating external dependencies, our definitions of ready and done, how we handled bugs, getting feedback from stakeholders and end-users and getting our sprint forecasts and deliveries in line. It was hard work, but good fun. The best bit was, the results spoke for themselves. We had very positive feedback, the quality was excellent and our trustworthiness with business was topnotch.

So the last strip, while quite often too true, isn’t the whole truth. There have been some successes too 😉