Last week I moderated a panel at nGage’s Enterprise Transformation Exchange on Developing an Agile IT Organization: Concepts, Culture and Concerns. The message from panelists was clear. Organizations looking to transform need to go beyond scrum practices and improving IT project execution. CIOs and other IT leaders are looking to agile practices to transform operations, develop new products, drive a stronger collaboration between business and technology organizations, and to establish a more agile mindset from employees up to executives. That means evolving from agile practices to an agile organization, culture, and mindset.

But there are stumbling blocks along the way and problems every organization needs to solve on their own. Here are some questions we received and how we collectively answered them.

How do you help developers adopt agile coming from a ticket-based support practice?

Handling different levels of scope creep

Running scrum with very small teams

A third question came up about how to run scrum when teams are very small and people have to wear multiple hats. When talking about scrum, people hear about the need for product owners, scrum masters, team, leads, business analysts, developers for different skills, and testers. That might be hard to pull of when small organizations are supporting many products and platforms.

One way to address this is to start with small ambitions. Small teams may require different people writing stories based on subject matter expertise. For some stories, a developer may be coding and another is testing. The responsibilities of the scrum master may have to be shared across team members.

Starting with small ambitions allows team members to learn different responsibilities and adjust to different roles.

Agile and scrum are not cookie cutter practices

While agile has a set of basic principles outlined in the agile manifesto and scrum has some defined practices, there isn’t a one-size fits all approach when applying it to different organizations and business drivers. In fact, it’s an evolving practice that needs maturity and realignment as priorities and organizational needs advance. Even when you have certified scrum masters onboard, or are using agile coaches, or if you are adopting a framework like SAFe or LeSS, you have to build and adapt the practice based on many factors.

So once teams get used to the basic practices, they need to learn to mature them over time. They need to bring outside help when useful, but learn to drive the practice on their own. That’s what separates teams that are practicing agile, to ones that are becoming agile organizations.