Prerequisites for Successful Agile Adoption

Management Buy-In

Management needs to buy-in to Agile as it is more about cultural transformation than it is about new roles, responsibilities, and process. The fundamental way the organization plans, budgets, manages, executes, and delivers solutions is changed completely. As the organization starts on the Agile transformation journey, it will go through the Tuckman stages of group development (Forming -> Storming -> Norming -> Performing) which may result in premature abandonment of Agile if management is not out front leading the Agile adoption.                

Dedicated Product Owner

The Product Owner must be a champion who is accountable for making decisions and setting the vision of the product.  Having a committee or product owner delegate who is not empowered to communicate the vision, articulate business value, and prioritize features will seriously jeopardize Agile adoption success.  Product Owners are part of the team and need to be engaged by actively participating in meetings, answering team questions, and proactively grooming the backlog to maximize team productivity and value delivered.

Team Training

The team must be trained on Agile processes, roles, and tools for successful Agile transformation.  Product Owners and Scrum Masters must understand how their new roles are different from traditional project management and technical leadership roles.  Team dynamics change dramatically with teams working together as a cross functional unit to deliver the committed work for each sprint.  An Agile sprint is not a 2 week waterfall cycle!

Automation

Delivering value in shorter cycles necessitates automation for builds, deployment, environment provisioning, etc. For brownfield projects, do not underestimate the effort to automate builds, testing, and deployment of legacy systems burdened by significant technical debt.  Without continuous integration practices in place, the team's velocity and productivity will suffer.  See my previous blog post on the subject: XP Technical Practices Essential to Successful Scrum Adoption

Finally, Agile is not a silver bullet that will fix all of your current "organizational debt", but it will expose it faster so it can be addressed during the Agile transformation journey.