How do you deal with employees who have worked with the waterfall approach

Question

Q:

How do you deal with employees who have worked with the waterfall approach for ages and now all of a sudden have to adapt to the agile way of working?

Answer 1

It is important for everyone to understand the reason why we work agile and what it means for the further development of the team. It’s not about organizing a short standup meeting every day or splitting the work into 2-week stages. But instead, I always start by explaining the core values of the agile world: Respect, Openness, Focus, Commitment, and Courage. Then I specify with the team whether everyone stands behind them and finally how exactly we want to implement them in the team.

The team should only consist of people who want to live the values and I support anyone who wants to learn this. Depending on the task of the team, I introduce appropriate procedures such as Scrum and Kanban and together with the team I decide how to start. Sometimes there happen to be people that simply don’t want to learn the agile way of working. In this case, I’m powerless and the only possibility is that this person goes out of the agile team and does something else or works in another company.