When we adopted agile we were not looking to reinvent our human resource policies, but our organization changed in fundamental ways that we did not predict. Peers routinely provide feedback to each other on performance. Team members schedule their own reviews. Everyone on the team has an opportunity to work with clients. Vacation schedules are submitted without regard to project delivery dates. We have programmers who job share, and mothers bring their infants to work.

What happens when your organization practices Agile software development for many years? Well, you get pretty good at Agile: you are able to apply Agile with reducing effort on challenging projects. But there is another interesting side-effect which is that your people internalize Agile values, so much so that Agile becomes second-nature to everyone!

In this photo tour, come see how a culture is infected with Agile thinking, you will see how we apply Agile to many activities like training- sessions, recruitment, staffing, office reforms, strategic decisions and more.

To enable the Agile Value “Courage”, we have to empower internal coaches, project managers, team leaders, and team members to change the organizations culture. Only a coach (or a manager / executive in his/her role as coach) is in the position to initiate and keep this process alive. Thus a coach has to be able to:

• make human systems transparent
• reduce or adjust complexity
• enforce dialogues and solutions
• set and enact clear goals
• build trust in the team and in the customer collaboration
• focus on sustainable decisions
• clarify conflicts

Integrating customer feedback into an agile process is a challenge. Iterations are short, and finding time for research, design & development means making sacrifices. In this session we’ll talk about finding organizational allies who can become collaborators in customer feedback tasks, getting effective & timely results, & potential pitfalls. Enlisting your organization in these efforts builds a customer-centric culture and provides the team with critical input. Examples will be drawn from our experience at Viget Labs re-designing the international web presence of a global hotel chain.