Being "allowed" to pair isn't success. Success is when the team enjoys pairing and they are more productive because of it. If you approach adoption from that point of view you'll have a much greater chance of success.
Jay Fields shares his experience in helping teams adopt pair programming successfully. He covers:
- Pairing stations
- Focusing on one team member at a time
- Pair switching
- Who should drive
- Pair mentor/learner model
- Smells:
- Uniterested and distracted pair
- Spell checking pair
- When not to pair
- Core pairing hours
- Simplest thing that could possibly work
- Code reviews
This article is an insightful look into what it takes to getting from "I think pair programming is a good idea" to "we are pairing regullarly and benifiting from it".