Agile software processes vary in detail, depth, impact and endurance as much as painting styles like graffiti differ from Baroque or Impressionist art. What can artists teach us about successful agile transitions? And what can past agile transitions teach us about styles that endured or faded away? Joshua Kerievsky will map agile transitions to art styles and identify elements that lead to success or failure. We will look at palettes of principles and practices, how and when agile styles may be effectively blended, when or how to do a sketch before jumping to the canvas, how initial transitions can morph into wholly different styles and whether to spread a consistent or varying style across a department or organization. Joshua will focus on four fundamental agile transitions styles as he walks you through case studies from the past decade.

Many managers have a large part of their personal identities wrapped up in their jobs and company responsibilities. We define who we are by what we do for a living. In agile development, the manager's job is very different from what most have learned and practiced. Managers struggle with what precisely their responsibilities are—and what to do each day. Some try a simple replacement strategy—shift from Gantt charts to burndown charts, from weekly status meetings to daily stand-ups, and from project post-mortems to iteration retrospectives. Because agile teams are supposed to be self-organizing, many of the "classic" management tasks are no longer important or even appropriate. Michele Sliger shares stories about how agile adoption has affected people like you and how it has changed individuals—their perceptions of agile, their leadership styles, and even their personal lives.

About 12 months ago, our company started an initiative to adopt agile practices across our entire organization—not only our software development organization, but our business organization. For years we had experienced outstanding results by utilizing Scrum for our clients' application development projects. Team productivity improved, executive visibility strengthened, and overall quality increased. Our goal was to capture similar results for our business. Find out how we're doing!

Agile methodologies have taken some heat when they appear to have failed to deliver expected benefits to an organization. In my travels as an agile coach, I have found that agile practices don't fail—rather the variations on agile adoption fail. Here are my top twelve failure modes. See which ones may be painfully familiar to you:

Note: This article was originally published on StickyMinds.com as "11 Ways Agile Adoptions Fail."This updated version includes additional information that explains why some agile adoptions that appear to have failed may never have been truly agile to begin with.