A great article - you have provided some excellent guidance on how our community can start to adopt agile approaches.

Like anything else that introduces change it requires time to personally and organizationally incorporate change in to a culture. This is no surpise, but I found your comment that you should see significant improvement in 5 to 10 years a bit disheartening. Most environments would likely demand a faster pay-back period.

In your experiences are there specific elements of Agile that could be adopted early and successfully? The Agile Adoption Survey suggests that it is knowledge of the Agile approaches that is an important factor in achieving success, but it does not go into detail about the specific techniques that could yield a positive outcome more immediately. As you have already mentioned you can't go for it all out once - could you comment on the major priorities for new Agile Practitioners?

Rob Beckmann, Principal Business Architect Caro Systems Inc.