I was reading an article by Garr Reynolds a few days ago.  He was talking about photos he had seen from the Cassini mission to Saturn.  One photo was of Saturn, looking back towards Earth.  Earth was this tiny little dot way off in the distance.  Garr made a statement that really resonated with me, especially in light of events which I will describe in a moment.  He said, "We don't usually think of our world from another perspective." 

Several weeks ago, I decided that I needed to look at my small world from another perspective.  I had decided that my attachment to my organization was becoming something that I needed to seriously reconsider.  I guess you can say I decided to inspect and adapt at a very extreme level.  I decided that what seemed to be working were our agile practices and our team. What didn’t seem to be working, from an agile perspective, was our organizational culture.  As it turns out, the rest of the development team was thinking the same thing.  In the end, we were all offered positions with a new organization and made the very scary decision to sever our attachment to our organization. 

Our organization responded very maturely by keeping all of us on for two weeks to wisely assemble a transition plan for our projects, etc.  To ensure that we provided our organization with the most value for the time we would invest over the next two weeks, we did what any Scrum team would do...we built a backlog and planned a Sprint.  The lead for the Transition Team acted as our Product Owner and did a great job prioritizing the backlog with us.  We held daily Scrums to keep everyone apprised of our progress and any impediments to getting what they needed.  The process provided complete transparency and visibility into our transition.  While our final Sprint ensured that our team acted as professionally as possible throughout the transition, it also provided an acceptance mechanism for our organization to document that we delivered everything they needed to be successful in the future.  In the end we completed all of our Sprint tasks and got acceptance on all of them as well (check our last Sprint burndown chart below).

Although it was an awkward situation, we did it.  We had closed out our final days at our organization doing the most valuable work we could do using the agile practices that we are completely committed to.  So, there you have it: The end of the first chapter of our team's agile journey.  Our agile journey will continue somewhere else now, still as a close-knit team...ever agile!