I just got back from a quick 1/2 day event in Boston organized and hosted by Rally Software. To be honest, I wasn’t really suprised that 90% of the audience had development and project management related roles and responsibilities (versus 10% executives). The questions asked during the panel and breakout-sessions however, targeted roll-out’s, continuous process improvement (beyond the team-level) and agile metrics. All of these topics elevated “agile” practices to the organizational level and demonstrated that many team members look beyond agile on the team-level.  That’s where rubber meets the road for many agile sponsors in reality. We have successfully demonstrated that we can apply agile on a team. But what if we need arguments to sell it to executive management? Michael Mah did provide hard data about agile success stories during his talk over lunch. I did the same for the agile adoption at AOL during the panel presentation.

But there were also other interesting take-aways from the success tour in Boston. The majority of the audience also assessed their knowledge-level right in the middle between beginner and expert. Proof that agile became more mainstream. 

When we were talking about executive sponsorship, organizational roll-out’s and shared ideas about how to duplicate success from one team to another,  we successfully used the umbrella term “agile” to define a set of good practices. I remember the days when heated debates about Scrum, Lean and XP dominated the agenda of such events. Not so yesterday. We saw the bigger picture.