One thing that kind of bothered me in my recent CSM training course was a consultant's comment that he didn't feel any need to try to "sell" Scrum to resistant management, implying that, if they didn't buy into it, it was their loss -- but winning over management is almost certainly a big part of what developers in that organization are expecting a consultant to HELP THEM WITH!

Just as management needs some level of developer "buy-in" for a project to have any chance of success, anyone hoping to transition a traditional organization to Agile needs to be able to SELL the concept, in terms a traditional business manager can understand. "Just trust us" is the arrogant Agile counterpart to management's "Just do it" -- and about as effective.

Agile is a TOUGH SELL! You're asking what may be a whole STACK of non-programming middle managers to abandon established practices, to override PMP-influenced resistance (which may finally be diminishing, now that the Project Management Institute has begun to take an interest in Agile), to buy into subversive concepts like "self-organizing teams", based on rationale they typically don't have the first-hand development experience to understand... knowing that if it all goes wrong, THEY'RE the ones who'll be held accountable.

Emphasizing Agile's ability to deliver better quality software, much faster, using fewer resources (better, faster, cheaper) is critical to convincing management to at least give Agile a TRY, but avoiding an outcome that permanently DISCREDITS Agile requires knowing where you can compromise the "purity" of your model, while holding the line on items necessary for Agile to actually produce benefits. Setting up a system of code review and mentoring, to ensure code is kept clean, maintainable, and extensible, is more important than insisting a large team of developers with poor dev. skills write sloppy unit tests to support their convoluted code. Generating some amount of unecessary documentation is preferrable to having your product fail a customer audit, or to have your project remain unfunded by corporate managers who don't buy into your "trust us" argument.

To offer reassurance and manage expectations, you'll need to provide justification for the changes that will need to take place, be able to offer credible alternatives to traditional methods of maintaining accountability, and openly acknowledge potential areas of conflict (for example, Agile organizations typically require a smaller number of more highly-skilled developers, which may eventually lead to issues of what to do with long-time employees who are under-performing in a department which is over-staffed, under the new standard).

By choosing your battles, and focusing on a few key issues like obsessive attention to code quality, replacing Big Design Up-Front with a commitment to iterative "refinement" of an initial outline spec., sqeezing in at least SOME amount of regular customer proxy feeback (usually from a busy marketing rep. who doesn't understand why you can't just go off and build the entire app. as specified), limiting the number of items under development to force developers out of their silos and encourage them to collaborate, holding regular informal reviews to try to improve the dev. process based on observed results... you are surreptitiously "infecting" the organization with traces of Agile, so you can break down resistance and eventually take over the host.

Don't make the mistake of the last organization I was in, where we managed to get buy-in on adopting specific Agile PRACTICES (continuous integration, unit testing...), but failed utterly to get commitment to the more important Agile PRINCIPLES. Management still insisted that we begin a three year project by dividing all work into "tasks", which were distributed to 15+ developers in two globally-distributed teams to "estimate", despite the fact that only three of us had significant first-hand experience with the technologies we would be using, and many developers suffered from questionable coding skills... with disasterous results.

Kanban is interesting here again, because it seems better able to overcome initial management and developer resistence, by requiring only very minor changes to ANY existing development process (including waterfall), with teams reportedly adopting more and more agile techniques naturally, over the course of the project, as productivity improvements become obvious to everyone involved.

"The (Pirate's Code) is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules."

            - Captain Barbossa, Agile pragmatist, Pirates of the Carribean, 2003

One of the more confusing aspects of Scrum for me has been the fact that "adapting" Scrum to fit your team's specific circumstances is always encouraged... but doing something like applying the "Kanban" technique to Scrum upsets many traditionalists.

"The surprising thing for me is that many smart Agile people - people I know to be intelligent insightful people - seem bugged by Kanban... I'm seeing Agile people behave as strangely about Kanban as traditional process folks behaved about Agile. They seem threatened." -- Jeff Patton

I've had a hard time getting some Scrum fundamentalists to even DISCUSS why they feel certain parts of Scrum should be "off limits" to change -- a strange idea, considering that Scrum, as it is typically applied today, is already very different from the way it was originally described. This seems inconsistent with Agile principles that encourage change based on continued analysis and experimentation, especially since the majority of people applying Kanban seem to be experienced Scrum practitioners, who report great success with this Scrum + Kanban approach in solving real-world issues that their teams struggled with under "straight" Scrum.

There is a subculture of agilists who seem to promote an "all or nothing", "enlightened vs. heathen" attitude, reflected in statements along the lines of "if you're not doing X, Y, and Z (or if you try to add Q), you're doing it wrong and you're not Agile". Many senior Agile dev. community members have explicitly spoken out against this, as counter-productive and just plain wrong. Kent Beck included an apology in the preface to the second edition of his book, Extreme Programming Explained, specifically to try to address this for the XP community, and published works by other industry thought leaders including Mary Poppendieck, Alan Shalloway etc. have made similar points. IBM has pushed for ALL its developers to adopt SOME form of agile, while explicitly REJECTING the idea that you need to follow any specific set of practices or methodology.

The Dancing Agile Elephant: IBM Software Group's Transition to Lean and Agile Development

Having worked both in highly-productive start up environments, and some amazingly dysfunctional corporate beauracracies, I'm an absolute supporter of developing software in a way that's consistent with Agile PRINCIPLES, and it is frustrating to think, after finally convincing your corporate management to take a serious look at what Agile has to offer, they'll encounter a discussion space filled with a mixture of hippie-dippy idealism and bickering that's likely just to make them roll their eyes and dismiss the topic out-of-hand.

"Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!" - Blazing Saddles, 1974

I became a "Microsoft Certified Professional" (MCP) for .Net back in '03, got my MCP for WPF last summer, and just picked up a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) badge, all of which means... SQUAT!

Any experienced developer can tell you an MCP certificate (or a CS degree) says absolutely NOTHING about whether someone can actually write production quality code or help a company ship products, and there's been some criticism over the way the term "Certified ScrumMaster" is sometimes promoted and abused. For the record, a Microsoft certification essentially proves you can memorize API trivia out of a study guide, and a CSM certification just says you've had two days of classroom exposure to the basic concepts of Scrum.

Of course, there's a LITTLE more to it than that. A Microsoft certification guarantees baseline familiarity with the recommended way to handle common Windows dev. tasks, and a CSM badge guarantees exposure to fundamental Agile concepts, along with a general idea of how to apply them, and obviously indicates a commitment to helping to refine a company's development process. When interviewing new hire candidates at my last three companies, I always asked about certification as evidence of some level of "devotion to craft", beyond simply working on "assigned features", but I was always more impressed if the candidate was familiar with notable developer community authors, or attended local dev. events.

From the job candidate perspective, certification is most useful in helping get past HR and other non-programming middle manager filters. From management's perspective, the risk in being overly impressed by a Microsoft certification is alot less than the risk of turning an inexperienced CSM loose on your enterprise organization's development process for your mission critical software. CSM training and resources often have a kind of naive idealism to them ("Let's play a game to illustrate collaboration!"), and I think a CSM who hasn't personally experienced harsh corporate realities is in danger of having management and technical staff quickly flip the "Bozo Bit" on them. For example, there's a HUGE difference in promoting "self-organizing teams" in an environment of top-notch, experienced, highly-motivated developers, versus in a bloated, complacent, corporate development environment.

I've been keeping up with Agile practices and approaches since the late '90's, and I'm currently most impressed by approaches that combine Scrum and Kanban, as described in Henrik Kniberg's newly-published "Kanban and Scrum, Making The Most of Both". The book is succinct and the clearest explanation I've come accross, of what all this "Kanban" stuff is that everyone keeps talking about, and how it relates to Scrum

Update (2/13): Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber recently parted ways with the Scrum Alliance, and started Scrum.org to offer more rigorous developer training.