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Recently I've moved into a new company and I am leading a team without any agile etc. I came from an agile environment and pair with great tools such as Jira with their cool feature such as Kanban board and also the Scrum. I'm thinking to implement Scrum so that the team has a great working culture.

Currently the new company where I'm working is using a software application called bitrix24 which doesn't have support for Agile methodology. My question is how to propose a change to the upper management, to purchase new software to accommodate the agile methodology.

What is the best approach to the upper management to purchase a new software? How to get buy-in?

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    A good team has a great working culture without implementing any processes. Start slowly introducing certain good practices and keep gathering feedback from the team. You may find that going full-scrum or full-kanban or full-[any methodology] would be a massive waste of time - in a team where teh members knows what to do and what their responsibilities are, The Mighty Process is just a burden.
    – JohnEye
    Jul 7, 2015 at 15:49
  • JohnEye- Great answer, you should think about putting these kinds of things in as answers, not comments so folks can vote on them.
    – Joel Bancroft-Connors
    Jul 7, 2015 at 18:02
  • @JohnEye , thanks for the info .. i think you're right , cause the team is new and nothing implemented yet , not even a source control , there alot of ground work to be done. I think whats important is the team feedback like you said
    – LArcenCiel
    Jul 9, 2015 at 1:52

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To tweak the Field of Dreams quote "Do it and the tools will come." Tools are not the solution, they are tools to aid the solution. You need the solution first.

Start running agile with a physical task board or if you absolutely need a tool, use something free like Trello.

The key is to show success using an agile framework (I'll assume Scrum) and show how using it gets better predictability, better quality, better visibility (nothing says visibility like a 3'x5' burn down chart on the wall to the bathrooms. While you're doing this, take a little hit to translate reporting to the legacy system.

Once you've got a track record of success, then you can point out how the successful development practices require translation to a legacy PLM software product and how it would save time and create more accurate reporting if you moved to a tool that supported the way you work.

Asking for Jire (or Rally or VersionOne) before starting agile is like asking for a Porsche before you learn to drive.

Edit: I realize I was pretty general. Start with one small team or project and do a simple agile conversion. Nothing fancy, nothing extreme, just a simple scrum implementation. Show it works small scale, but make sure the pilot isn't going to be unscalable. Doing a pilot with advanced TDD and Continuous Integration won't scale easily to the whole company. KISS Pilot will be your best approach.

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I had the same problem. And do you know how I solved it? I bought all needed software for own money. Of course, it's not the best solution, but for me it was much more easily, than to get all required approvements and permissions. 30$ is not a huge sum of money for comfortable work (with Jira, Jira Agile and Stash). It's not an advertisement ;-)

Sorry, if I'll echo Joel, but: tools are not those things, that you need to worry about.

Let's take a look at Agile Manifesto:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

By my opinion, you will have much more problems with interactions inside your company, than with tools. It's hard to be agile if your company is not agile. You can try to become a driver of changes in your company, but It is very hard challenge and topic for another question.

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  • haha.. actually i have a thought like yours to fork out my own money to get those software , cause to be honest it doesn't cost much , i think it's somewhere like less than $100 ^^
    – LArcenCiel
    Jul 9, 2015 at 1:54
  • What happens to your colleagues when you leave the company and stop paying the bill?
    – jmort253
    Jul 10, 2015 at 10:30
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    @jmort253 There are 3 options: 1) they will switch license to one of them and will pay for these programs by themselves. 2) Next SM will get all approvements for these programs and company will pay for them. 3) Team will switch to another software. Team will lose all data only if they will choose third option. My solution is not the best. I wrote about it in my answer.
    – Sergey Kudryavtsev
    Jul 10, 2015 at 12:24
  • I know... you did a good job explaining it wasn't the best answer. I just wanted to help cover more bases. Thanks for replying.
    – jmort253
    Jul 10, 2015 at 14:13
  • @jmort253 Yes, my solution is not the best, but it's not bad. Try to look at the problem, that you described, from different point of view. I had no good argument, why we should switch from Redmine to Jira (except "Jira is cool"). But next SM will have very good reasoning for management: 1) The team already has great experience with the current software. 2) The team likes these programs. 3) The team would lose some data and a lot of time switching to a new tracker again.
    – Sergey Kudryavtsev
    Jul 12, 2015 at 10:11
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Obtaining buy-in (for Scrum specifically, or Agile in general) will be a prerequisite to approaching management to purchase new software. After obtaining buy-in, convincing management to purchase supporting software will be greatly facilitated. Without obtaining buy-in, purchasing software will be a "no go".

If you are convinced that the methods from your previous environment can be successfully applied in your new environment, then make a case for that with your new upper management. Express your case in terms of concrete examples of success in your previous environment, and show why you believe that success is transferable to the new environment. (e.g. what is similar between the two)

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Why do you want to change? Which problem are you aiming to solve? And why & how will Scrum improve the situation? You should be able to answer all these first. As is, it reads a lot like blind faith in powers you don't understand.

Once you can answer those questions, you can knock at your manager's door and talk.

But: Accept the possibility that Scrum and Kanban will not make the process better.

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Prepare a PowerPoint presentation factually demonstrating the benefits of adopting this approach.

Show the pros and cons of current state and desired state, also be clear on the roadmap to implement it.

Some people reject improvement changes just because it was not well presented (and consequentially not bought in).

When you talk business, you talk efficiency, cost savings, increased productivity. This is like giving lollies to kids... Who doesn't want one???

Good luck

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  • ^^ thanks . yup i think you're right .. people want to know why change this and not that etc.. bla x 2 and by coming out those slides with strong points i think it's a strong way to convince them
    – LArcenCiel
    Jul 9, 2015 at 1:56
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The first question you need to answer is "what's wrong with Bitrix24?". If the answer isn't "it total pants" then you need to rethink your entire approach, as it seems it is "I want the same tools and development environment I had at the last place".

You've moved, time to understand and use the tooling the new place has - sometimes its better than what you had before.

Bitrix seems to be a recently developed collaboration project management platform, so it should be ok to run agile with it, even if it doesn't have explicit support for Scrum (which is probably a good thing as it means you'll have to go back to basics to implement Agile the way it as meant to be done).

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  • the problem what i found with Bitrix24 is , it doesn't support any of the Kanban or Scrum entirely. Its a great CRM but not a good tools for agile. Ya you're right it's a new collaboration tools and some area they still able to improve. I've also looked into Trello but found out that , best still Jira
    – LArcenCiel
    Jul 9, 2015 at 1:58
  • Jira? Try Redmine. But still, if you think agile requires any tools then you're mistaking agile for some particular non-agile process. I did agile 20 years ago with nothing more than a whiteboard.
    – gbjbaanb
    Jul 9, 2015 at 7:39
  • questions for you hope you done mind. Right now the team pretty much get use of taking the task from Bitrix24 , if i implement the usual scrum process where only put it in the white board , will it be too troublesome for the team?
    – LArcenCiel
    Jul 10, 2015 at 12:22
  • implement different statuses for each task, create a view of each status and voila - you have a scrum board showing the state of your tasks. Only you won't be able to easily see the tasks grouped, but maybe you can set a view to display that in report format at least. All a scrum board does is display the tasks with their status in a different format. You don't need that to still have the tasks moving.
    – gbjbaanb
    Jul 10, 2015 at 13:54
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I agree that individuals and interactions should prevail over processes and tools and that it is better to start with a simple offline Scrum board. I do wish you all the success in this challenging task and hope you will succeed in introducing the Agile methodology in your team and company.

However, when it comes to the selection of an Agile tool you might also want to look at alternatives to Jira: Jira is surely more well-known just because it had existed long before Agile arose and by that time had a large network of users. But a number of Agile development tools have been developed specifically for the Agile methodology. They are less known (in comparison to Jira) but they do support the Agile methodology better. I represent one of such companies and we frequently hear from our customers that Targetprocess (http://www.targetprocess.com) better reflects the Agile methodology, is more customizable and has a better UI.

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  • In my opinion, this post looks like surreptitious advertising.
    – Sergey Kudryavtsev
    Aug 27, 2015 at 15:37
  • yes, I agree it can look as advertising, it is however my opinion and the words we hear from the customers...
    – Alena Kuzniatsova
    Aug 29, 2015 at 21:14

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