It´s now more then one year already that I´m working for Agile Partner. Here are my personal insights that I gathered during that time. Not that much revolutinary, or even new stuff, but I experienced that it is a completely different thing to read or hear about these things, or to discover and learn it for yourself:

• Retrospectives are essential. Give the team room and time to lean back, inspect & discuss. The outcome (= improvements) will be worth the investment of time.
• Change in small steps. Don´t try to achieve everything at once. It´s easier for people to adapt a small change at one point in time, then to try introduce huge changes to the workflow people are used to. Instead change small, and change often, if you feel there´s still room for improvements.
• Don´t argue about the people in your team. They´re the best you have, and the they´re all you need. “Whoever comes is the right people”. They will do what ever is needed to get the job done, and they will get the job done well.
• You can´t force a self-organizing team to do anything. Even if you know that your proposal/ idea would improve things. If the team´s not ready yet, it is not ready. If the team feels it´s necessary, it will introduce the change sooner or later via the retrospective.
• Don´t insist on your ideas/ proposals/ way of working. It´s more important to find a consense everybody can work with then that you´ve been the winner of a discussion. And it will be even more succesful on the long term to go the way that has been decided on by the whole team.
• Your scrum/ agile implementation will change over time, as your team learns and as it is getting more and more mature. There´s nothing bad about it. Why do “scrum by the book” (by the way which book in particular?), if there´s no other reason then “the book”. As long as you´re still respecting the agile manifesto, everything will be fine.

What are your Aha-moments from working within agile teams? Please share them in the comments, we´re most happy to discuss!