Organizations are looking to adopt Agile approaches and methodologies, to gain productivity and quality improvements. However, in many cases, such Agile transformations seem to be doomed to failure before they begin. This article looks at one of the key causes of why Agile transformations fail in many organizations.

This chapter shares anti-patterns we have observed in organizational transformation initiatives, with the goal that you will be able to identify them and avoid them to change successfully.

Many large, traditional organizations and their famously successful leaders have embarked on ambitious missions to "create, operate and trade" new businesses to compete with disrupters in an ever-changing economy. These organizations establish corporate venture funds, create internal accelerators or incubators, partner with or spin up innovation labs, and hire big names from Silicon Valley hoping they’ll sprinkle some magic dust on the company and reclaim the glory they once achieved.

For any organization that has projects that are of huge size, complex in nature, with huge numbers of resources located at various geographical locations, a lot of interdependencies are present and a lot of coordination is required. As not taking up a big project is not an option, people who are involved in running these types of projects need to constantly review and monitor their progress and delivery. To do this monitoring effectively and to improve continuously for high-quality product delivery that satisfies the customers, different organizations adopt different mechanisms and methods at various stages in the life cycle of the projects. Holding release retrospectives is one such tool that has been effectively used by many organizations, with good results.

This article examines the Agile myth that constant process improvement is imperative. It discusses the fact that if you need to continuously observe your process, you should wait for the pauses between iteration to perform process improvement.

Do you feel your team has plateaued? Is the team not improving as much? Is the team lacking the motivation to challenge themselves to improve? Are the improvements you implement moving you in many different directions with no focus? Are you collecting a long list of problems but you never get around resolving them? Time to stop collecting problems and start improving! Toyota Kata is a structured and focused approach to create a continuous learning and improvement culture. A kaizen culture.

Many organizations have struggled over the past few decades with a blizzard of process improvement methodologies such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Kaizen, JIT Production, and Re-Engineering. These operations are understandably leery of adopting new methodologies given their past experience, especially with a focus on return on investments and leveraging existing practices. This article examines the relationship of Agile, CMMI®, Lean Production and the Six Sigma Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC) roadmap. The intent is to explain how these methodologies might be synergistically combined for a cohesive approach to enhance continuous process improvement.

This article presents the models and standards that you can use to manage your software process: Scrum, CMMI, ISO, ITIL, SPICE, Six Sigma, Prince 2, etc.

Key decisions ranging from high level strategies to the deployment of improvements can become much simpler when we view the approach of our process improvement work in the same way we would for the development of more conventional software products.

Using this framework, software engineers and project managers can quantitatively manage software projects for improving processes by applying Six Sigma in conjunction with PSP/TSP.