Agile Boston’s April meeting was quite a treat. About 60 lucky attendees got to hear Ken Schwaber, grandfather of Scrum, talk for an hour in an intimate setting at PayPal’s Boston headquarters. Ken spoke about scaling Scrum toward what he called the Path to Agility. You can stay in touch with Ken at: http://www.scrum.org/path-to-agility

Addressing some of the challenges facing organizations as they strive to become agile, Ken first presented data showing Agile projects are reported to be 3 times more successful than waterfall projects. Summarily, an Agile organization has a competitive advantage (because it can adapt to market changes more quickly and correctly.)  If your organization wishes to become agile it can either work toward becoming agile (Path to Agility) or “buy” agile, but of course if you really could just buy it off the shelf then you should expect no competitive advantage.

Ken also highlighted common metrics for tracking progress. These include ratios such as:

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