Iterative projects often require fundamental changes to the way team members work on a project. On a traditional project, it is easy to avoid really working together as a team. Everyone tends to have their own specialty and deliverables, and it is easy for a person to work in isolation and only interact with other people by passing documents around.
Successful iteration is very different, and requires a very interactive, collaborative way of working, involving:
- Commitment - The whole team (including business representative participants) needs to be committed to making the project a success. This doesn’t have to mean working long hours or promising more than can be delivered; it means just doing whatever it takes to work as a team and meet the iteration’s objectives.
- Focus - The team needs to keep focused on the iteration’s short-term objectives and not get sidetracked by other issues or activities. This is particularly true of the management team members, who need to stick to the iteration’s set of objectives after they have been set and agreed to with the team. The time to change the project’s direction is between the iterations, not during them. Read More
In the previous kernel journals we have explored the value that development organizations can get from a process kernel that codifies what each and every project always has to do, in a way that is distinct and separate from how different project teams might choose to go about doing it, some benefits being:
One of the frequent questions we are asked is "how can I get the time to explore needs when the business says that it is already done - "it's in the business case", even when it is obviously not complete? This is actually a pretty common occurrence - nobody wants to take time to understand needs because they think it has already been done. 
Most project management approaches address risk in a fairly superficial way: risk mitigation is viewed as an important activity, but one that is largely a distraction from the main effort of the project. Risks are identified at the start of the project, they are usually assiged to someone to address the risks, but these risk-mitigation activities are largely viewed as things that take away from the project work. In practice the risks are only identified once and then they are largely forgotten in the large amount of work to be done.
In the previous kernel journals we have looked at the many practical applications of a process kernel that is based on the key software development entities (known as Alphas) that software projects add value to by progressing through their value states. We have seen that there are many advantages to separating these “whats” (progressions) that we are trying to achieve, from the many possible “hows” (software processes and practices) that describe how we might achieve and evidence these progressions, including the ability to set objectives and track progress in a common and consistent way irrespective of what specific practices a project happens to adopt.
As technologists, we tend to collect very detailed information and present it in a very technical way. We talk about things like process maturity levels, and productivity indexes. I have even seen some measurement data about Agile maturity models that attempt to show how agile we are. The problem with this kind of approach is it doesn’t provide anything that the business and the customers can relate to. 
Over the last few days a number of people have asked me the same question: “How can we get more accurate requirements?” While I agree it is not nice to answer a question with a question, in this case you might bend etiquette a bit because in reality this question can be hard to answer. For example, why is it necessary and which problem does it solve? Or, what exactly do you mean with accurate? And do you have accurate requirements and you want more of those? And in that case, more than what? Or do you have inaccurate requirements which you want to become more accurate? And if so, how much more?