For the last session of Agile Open Northwest, Chris pulled out a Greatest Hit, his Group Wisdom Without Groupthink workshop on the topic, "What Makes Agile Projects Succeed?" This workshop teaches a structured brainstorming technique while exploring the topic–a two fer one proposition. First, participants brainstorm silently on the topic, then there are several rounds in which people list their ideas while a scribe posts them on the wall. We had around thirty ideas from this group of around fifteen people. Next, everyone got eight stickers and voted for their top choices. At the end, we rearranged the items according to their popularity and discussed the results.

The winning notiions, as someone pointed out, emphasized teamwork over the technical aspects of agile. "How can Continuous Integration rank so low!?!?" one developer cried. Well, it's possible that in a room full of technical experts, these things are taken for granted and thus don't rank as "important" even though they are essential! Every group we lead through this exercise has a different outcome, as you can see here and here.

Below are the rankings for this group:

10 votes

Agile coach

 

9 votes

Freedom to fail

 

8 votes

Short iterations

Cutomer driven goals

Team dynamics

Commitment to the process

 

7 votes

Continuous Integration

 

6 votes

Empower product owner

Sustainable pace

 

5 votes

Adaptable people

 

4 votes

Knowledge  sharing

Technical competency

Communicate status

Active product owner

 

3 votes

Management understanding

Good scrum master

People who fit the process

Unit testing & tools

Definition of done

Prioritize

 

2 votes

Realistic expectation of velocity

Trust and accountability

Lessons learned

 

1 vote

Reward

People

PM tools

Trust the process

 

0 votes

Team brainstorming

Management support

Good people manager

Desire to learn