The movement is at risk people. Forums full of modern day Pharisees preaching this and that, demanding practices be applied with mindless rigour. Worshipers of one cult or another, failing to recognise they are in a cult or that 1000 other cults exist within the same belief system.
Ham-fisted application of practices, large consultancies getting on the bandwagon with Agile methodologies (spare me – see my last post on Agile https://www.shibusa.com.au/thats-not-agile/ ), none of whom I’ve seen use Agile to run their businesses by the way. Corporates creating monolithic ‘big brother is watching’ software solutions to control, monitor and compare supposedly empowered, self-directed, self managed teams.
It reminds me of the Life of Brian. A bunch of people got together to make Software go faster in 2001, wrote some common sense principles, and now we have ‘gourd worshipers’ and ‘sandal worshipers’ all trying to kill each other in the name of Agile.
And in my travels I come across more and more resentment, resistance and anger about poor application of Agile. What a shame. And it’s kind of funny, Agile has achieved cult status and if you are in an organisation using these practices people are terrified to speak against the ‘new ways’ for fear of persecution, so you end up with people paying lip service and privately seething because the implementation has been done really poorly and before you know it you’ve alienated half the company. It drives me nuts because a key tenant of Agile is not to let anything that is not working go un-fixed, and that should apply to the implementation of Agile itself! “We’ve been doing it for 6 months, there is no accountability, and we are delivering nothing, we don’t know where we are going and our standups go for an hour and we all hate Agile” …..
It’s all I can do to intercept the words my brain has sent to my mouth saying “are you #$%^ kidding me? And you’ve let it go for SIX MONTHS. Agile’s all about short cycle times and realtime blocker removal ” and replace them with “oh really, lets have a retro and see what we can work out”.
There is no silver bullet here, all I can do is to remind you to go back the principles and intent and if its not working STOP and course correct.
But if you are thinking about going on an Agile journey here are just a couple of things to consider to avoid the ‘Agile is Sh!te’ backlash from poor implementation.
Know why you want Agile
If someone sees a great Agile team in action, it is a thing of beauty. “We want our teams to work like that”. Here’s the thing. You can use Agile to run an urgent program with fast cycle times, deliver faster better software, or you can use the work practices to transform your culture, breaking down silos and increasing small ‘a’ agility across your entire business.
It is very important for you and your leadership team to know where you are on that continuum and to have thrashed out your elevator pitch and are able to simply and consistently articulate the ‘why’. What is your Definition of Done for your Agile implementation, and is the whole leadership team clear, and behind it. If not don’t start. Nothing will unravel you faster than inconsistent messages from your leadership team.
Get Started Quickly and Support it
You can talk til you are blue in the face about Agile but the lights invariably don’t come on until people experience it. So get going quickly and course correct as you go. Make sure that someone is there who has done it, preferably across a wide variety of implementations, not just one (zealot alert). Train your own coaches by all means but don’t let them loose on their own until they are battle scarred. Don’t ever let anybody ‘coach’ who has never participated in a successful Agile project. Iteration Managers become a great source of corporate knowledge and expertise, and rotating them is a great way to spread knowledge.
Executive Support
Especially important if you are doing this at scale. Executives must participate in the change. Projects and Programs running Agile will start to spin fast if they are supported. If issues and blockers that the team are identifying aren’t dealt with quickly, the team will be like a car with square wheels, moving forward in fits and starts. The Executive must create the right eco system for the team to accelerate smoothly, participating more organically in Showcases and visiting Standups to lend assistance in real time, not just at the next Steering Committee. If you implement Agile in a team but you still require a 10 page brief to make a decision to get an issue resolved your team will fail.
Deep not wide
Be realistic about the size of your organisation and the resources you have to support it. You will get far better results in a large organisation if you concentrate on getting a couple of key areas spinning right with good support and then rolling the Practices laterally. If you do it really well in a particular place the energy it creates will create a demand from other parts of the business. If you spread your spend and support too thin, you will get widespread Tragile and the inevitable backlash.
Anyway, that’s just a couple of pointers …. Until next time….