Agile is easy on paper - how to address the intangibles

I recently gave a talk at the rally agile cafe conference about Agile and SCRUM practices and I was really intrigued by  how common the evolution of agile is across industries. There were several examples of Agile implementations with rally and we crossed industries from consumer electronics, to fortune 100 companies like John Deer ( where they use Agile to build robot controlled tractors with GPS systems) and enterprise software. What struck me was the same difficulties arise when you traverse the agile maturity curve - what I mean is the following

1) Culture - All the books talk agile in a fairly straightforward way - but what happens in reality is that culture comes into play about how you really want to absorb agile. The VP of Eng of the consumer electronics company was acknowledging that its not just good enough to put in the tools and practice in place. I feel that you really need to graduate to the "culture of agile". The "culture" of agile means, putting in the right practices around what it means to implement agile, how you communicate to your customers on releases, what the impact this has on your products.  In order to do this right, the business has to transform in how it works so that the right expectations are managed. Unless one doesnt really think about that, then you dont really implement agile in the right way. It means, Agile has to be embraced at the exec level and fundamentally understood.

2) Ecosystem - Agile has to exist in an ecosystem of the right toolset so that you have the right level of visibility to other organizations and their ability to manage. Visibility to me means better predictability, staying one step ahead. Really respecting the statistics you get out of the toolset(I have used Rally and Scrumworks the past). For instance, velocity charts, and understanding the gradient of the work product and seeing whether you will really make it. The ability to figure out how many bugs you think you can fix in a release and making some hard choices on where to push back and which features are key.  The other part of the Ecosystem is how the impact of particular feature has on customers  and how your product owners evaluate risk of features and their scope. This impacts sales and possibly product services organizations that need to work with the product.


I firmly believe that a successful Agile shop takes into account all of these factors in order to provide a more predictable plan of attack and a better way to manage product and customer expectations.

thoughts ?