Here's how "Agile" has worked for me. Start with a big list of features you wan to implement. Product Owner/Manager keeps list in proper order of importance.

Here's how "Agile" has worked for me. Start with a big list of features you wan to implement. Product Owner/Manager keeps list in proper order of importance. Every 2 weeks team gets in a room for 1 hour and marks off what they have done and picks off what needs to be done for the next iteration - generally you try to pick off less work then you think you can do. We'd let you pull in additional work as the "iteration" went on - any extra work completed was a bonus for the PM. Unlike traditional agile - we found that having QA and bugfixes trailing dev by an iteration worked best. repeat. Now with this, and it really depends what you're working on, you can still do "releases" every iteration if you want - but you don't have to (but to release a feature it would take generally 2 iterations one for dev, one for test/bugfixes). Generally we would only do daily standups if we're 1. Relying heavily on an outside team. 2. Getting close to a release. Standups always had to occur before 11am (usually at 10) as close to the start of the day as possible. I found this method worked great. It left the managers with the ability to do some scheduling - w/o those effing "points" or "cupcakes" level of work meetings - which created metrics that no one used. You still get transparency and can release quickly as features get implemented.