Building an Agile Team
The company I work for now has an internal IT department that creates internal and customer facing products. When started the company was full of cowboy coders and heroics. This gave way fairly quickly to waterfall-ish style process which when I was brought on was starting to overwhelm the department to the point of jeopardizing important projects, mitigated only by individual heroics.
The Director of Engineering (a friend of mine) understood what was happening, but didn’t have the experience, or the time to personally lead the implementation of agile processes to bring his shop back on track. I did have some experience in leading agile teams and was ready to take on the bigger challenge this represented. After many hours of after hours discussions circumstances made it possible for me to come on full time and enact the proposed changes. One of the benefits of having the director work this change ahead of time was that by the time I came on board most of the political battles (executive-wise) had been fought. Now all that was left were the rank and file, a somewhat more challenging effort, but one I had dealt with before.
With the background out of the way, on with the show!