As an Agilist, I have watched Agile move from small teams of developers to larger and more encompassing activities in the organization the following fact began to emerge.  Agile is not for development, not ‘real’ Agile that is. Most of the projects I have seen are over in 6 to 8 months or between 12 and 16 iterations.  Most teams don’t start to to really hit their stride until around the 6th to 8th iteration.  The team members trust themselves and each other, the IDE they are using is smooth, CI is usually in place and the team is pretty self sufficient.  ScrumMasters are sitting around looking for work and the PO is moving along.

When you look at the average Support, Maintenance, Architecture, Help Desk, Ops, and DBA groups, you find people that have been in place for years.  When these teams get rocking the same curve shows up but then – around the 20th iteration things start to hit hyper cool drive.  Overtime, weekend and other ‘catch up’ time wasters shrink or are planned weeks ahead of time.  The KanBan board is totally self managed,  Things go up get pulled forward and finished.  New people integrate easily and more and more peer initiated cross training occurs.

Most interesting is that costs go down as Lean principles really have a chance to mature in place and become woven into the fabiric of the organization.