Agile Advice – Creating High Performance Teams In Business Organizations

This concept of self-organizing is one of the most difficult for traditionally-trained project managers

Self-organization is a fundamental part of being Agile

On an Agile Team, a person is removed from the team by assigning them work.

Guess what?!? THAT is the BIG difference between Agile Teams and Project (or Functional) Teams.
On a project, the Project Manager gets someone onto the team by assigning them work!!!!

OpenAgile puts teams on the other path: the path of allowing for greater and greater learning from others.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that Scrum is fatally flawed. In fact, I think that in some environments, where teams truly are unsafe, where people tend to hate their work, where dysfunctional bureaucracy is deeply embedded in the organization's culture… in these environments Scrum is actually the right place to start. Scrum is great for product development in high-crisis situations: save your product with Scrum!

Learning Scrum is about learning the tool, not learning how to pick and choose pieces of a tool.

Iterative and incremental delivery is used to allow for the early discovery and correction of mistakes and the incorporation of learning and feedback while at the same time delivering value early.

Even if the work cannot actually be delivered incrementally, it almost always can be divided in a way so that it can be inspected in stages

One can see clearly from the diagram that the non-agile delivery of value at the end of a project is also extremely risk prone and susceptible to change. If the project is cancelled just before it delivers, then a fairly substantial amount of effort is wasted. In the Agile iterative delivery situation, an endeavour can be cancelled at almost any time and it is likely that substantial value has already been delivered