Study the current situation
Analyze the current situation in the sense that what's going wrong. Study the customer opinions about the software services that are being served to them. Study the stories of how the software programs are being executed. Interview as many people as possible including the management and asses the situation. This is required because any change must happen for a reason and the reason must be carefully understood. It may so happen that after assessing the current situation, we may conclude that the current methodology is doing well and there is no need for change. Find out if there is any support from the management for deploying the change. Everyone's support is a must and if not, better do not take the risk.
Train the people
There is learning curve involved. Everyone should be trained to learn the agile framework as to what is involved and how the new changes will actually work. Its very obvious that people must be trained on agile framework. People need to understand each every aspect of agile methodology. Training should be comprised of team exercises to better understand how agile is going work.
Change people mindset
This is the prerequisite for any change that an organizations wants to have and is a toughest challenge. Remember that "There is no process that can change people". Attempt to have a process to change people will fail for sure. Its all about people themselves who can change. It is just that there has to be a platform and a motivation for the people to change. Everything happens for a reason and the reasons must be very well explained to the people and convinced to the people. If people do not change their mindsets, nothing is going to change. The true fact.
Change the team structure
This is very essential. In a typical agile methodology, the team is small usually 8 to 9 members. Need to reorganize the team in such a way that the people are comfortable with one another. This can be found by observing the day to day activities of people, who is comfortable with whom. Basically the frequencies must be matched. And the team structure should not be changed. Over the long term the team adjusts itself to understand and help one another to accomplishing the tasks, sprints if I want to say in agile way. There should not be any concept of "reporting managers". Its all just developers and no managers delegating work and tracking instead its the individuals who are responsible for a given task to complete and deliver.
Explain motivational factors often
Once all set to deploy the new methodology, the people may start feeling not comfortable at the initial stage and may tend to go back to the old method of doing things (Scrum bugs). Well, this may happen because people have settled with one method over many years and are already comfortable and to get away with this obstacle, motivate people by repeating the benefits/results that people will be getting over the long term.
Answer people questions
Yes, there will be lots of questions that each one will be asking and they must be answered satisfactorily. Give real time examples for each question. Tell people that we are not alone. If there are proven results adopting agile framework, then why can't we get benefited out of it. This can happen with an agile expert who has actually gone through all the obstacles that were arisen and successfully resolved them.
Conclusion
As I highlighted its the matter of changing the people mindset, a toughest challenge that we have in deploying any new methodology. People must be coached(by scrum masters), motivated often and regular rhythm has to be maintained. There is no any official methodology to adopt a new methodology. So it depends on the current situations and the reasons for change. A change can best happen by an external person in my opinion, So hiring an agile expert and having him/her in the organization is good idea.
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