Agile in crisis?

[Richard Brewster]

I was browsing InfoQ articles and saw this.

http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/agile-adoption-transformation

The book is by a "certified scrum coach". (As you may know, the scrum
certification thing is called into question by the software craft movement.)

I was chatting with my wife, Diana, who has some experience working on
agile teams. I said, look at this: "Agile failure is pervasive."
"Agile is due for failure." Right away we both thought that it must be
related to a conflict with hierarchical corporate culture. And indeed,
'culture' is a focus of the book. I'm not that interested in this
particular book. But in my experience one of the hardest parts getting
agile practices into place has been resistance to change from
management. Agile practice often has to be sold as a kind of 'process'
that people are required to adhere to, like CMMI, so that managers can
retain control. The most successful agile adoptions I've personally
seen are where the nominal project manager was supportive, gave up
command and control, and let the team take responsibility. In a lot of
companies this is not likely to happen easily. When the agile buzz
comes along and managers are directed to try it, they work to subvert
it. They want it to fail, perhaps without realizing they do. They feel
threatened. This is covered quite well in Mike Cohn's excellent book,
Succeeding With Agile Software Development.

Would this be a useful topic for discussion? How, in your experience,
hierarchical management structures conflict with agile practices.

-Richard Brewster

http://rabbitsoftware.com

[Charity Preuss]

I would be very interested in discussing this.  I am working for a company about to embark on the transition from waterfall to agile and this is my biggest concern.

Charity Preuss

[Andrea Ross]

I think this would make an excellent topic for discussion.  We all want the projects we work on to be noted success stories, so knowing the traps will help us put the safegards in place to avoid them. 

 

Questions that come to my mind are:

What are the warning signs of a 'Failed Scrum implementation'?

What can a scrum team member do to influence the project to ensure success?

What metrics can be used to measure scrum performance over traditional projects?

With an understanding of the fears of the PMP style project manager is there anything that a scrum team can do to allay those fears?

Bring your stories of projects that 'Failed' due to using agile methodologies. (This may sound morbid, but there is lots of opportunity for learning in those stories)

 

I'm looking forward to seeing the group on August 21!

On Sunday, August 5, 2012 9:36:04 AM UTC-4, Richard wrote:

[Eddie Gotherman]

I just finished reading the minibook... and wow!  Thanks for passing this along Richard!

Andrea & Charity, I would love to discuss this at an upcoming meeting too.  

Simon, do we have any other plans for next week's meeting?

Questions:

- Know of anyone who has failed at Scrum?  Then tried Kanban?  But ultimately found their perfect blend? 

- If the goal is continually learning fast and improving...Is it better to adhere to one methodology religiously or experiment with many?

- Scrum has worked very well for our combined software/test teams, but it is very difficult integrating other functions into the scrum team.  For example: hardware, mechanical, layout, compliance, documentation, etc.. What are your experiences with using Kanban for a system/business level view, but Scrum for software?  Does the scrum team eventually become more and more Kanban-ish? ... keeping user stories, standups, etc.. but ditching iterations for more of a continual flow?

- Have any practical suggestions for encouraging the cultural change that enables the "full" Agile Transformation?  How have you moved beyond just implementing some new processes?

- Beyond the development team, how has Agile changed your business culture?  How many non-developers attend your standup or planning meetings?

- This larger of issue of being "Agile in an inelastic organization" was the topic for a paper submitted by one of my co-workers back in 2005 at EclipseCon. (Check it out here : https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8933449/XR15-CostsOfCompliancePaper.pdf)  The issue of Agile causing disruptive imbalances between development teams and other parts of the business isn't new.  It's been with us from the start... but didn't become as painful until larger organizations began widespread use.  Sihota's Survival Guide does a great job of addressing this.  So....Have you learned to accept the level of transformation your organization is capable of based on its current culture? Or is culture not the only thing holding you back?

-Eddie

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