- Find friendly managers and start working with them
- Start producing value as soon as possible
- Communicate everything you do to as many people as possible at every level
- Be nice, explain everything clearly and help everyone
- Avoid jerks, for real
- Find a lightning rod absorbing damage in your stead
From Leading from the Middle Part Two: Selling Ideas and Playing Politics by Mark Schwartz
| Mechanics focused | Benefits focused |
|---|---|
| We have a backlog that gets groomed by the product owner. | We can shift course on a dime to meet the company's needs. |
| We encourage people to fail fast. | We mitigate risk by trying different approaches and seeing which is most effective. |
| We have a sprint review every two weeks. | There are frequent checkpoints with users and their managers to make sure we are on course and to provide transparency to the enterprise. If you'd like, you can come and see our progress every two weeks. |
| We don't use Gantt charts or deliver on a schedule. | We emphasize speed and deploy new capabilities as soon as they are ready and fully tested rather than working backward from a due date. |
| There is a Scrum Master and a Product Owner. | Our teams focus on delivering value. There is someone representing the business users who is deeply involved and makes sure that each capability is something that adds business value. |
| We will use an Agile & DevOps approach. | We are going to break down the work into small chunks that we can complete quickly and deliver. We'll use that as a way to manage risk and to make sure that we are still on track. We think it is important to give the company flexibility as things change by reducing the cost of change. |