Archive for the ‘Benefits of Agile’ Category
The Things They Say
Here is a compilation of summaries of Amazon reviews on the Kindle edition of The Concise Executive Guide to Agile:
If you are such a decision maker, and like most are hard-pressed for time, then you must read this book. Dr. Gat cuts right to the chase and gives pearls of wisdom – that come from having “done it himself” when it comes to the daunting task of TRANSFORMING an organization into successfully applying Agile methods. If you’re a team leader and you need executive support and buy-in, then buy this book for the key people whom you value the most. Give it to them as a gift. They will thank you for it!
“The Concise Executive Guide to Agile” by Israel Gat is a must-read for enthusiasts of agile methods at all levels of the organization. Israel has well over 30 years of industry experience, has his PhD in Computer Science, and has helped manage an agile rollout involving 1,000 software developers. While there are many technical and managerial treatises on agile methods emerging in increasing frequency all of the time, Israel’s new guide is meant to explain the essence of agile methods to R&D, Marketing, Sales, Program Management, Professional Services, Customer Support, Finance, or IT folks.
Dr. Gat goes beyond the traditional software development process literature and broadens the case for the Agile organization, with effectiveness, efficiency, and integrity – much like the Agile development process described by Israel.
A must read for any organization leader dependant on software whether it be for software for internal operations or software features built for customer sales. Israel’s breadth and depth of both knowledge and experience shine through as he provides practical advice to help you understand what Agile can and can not do for your organization.
For me, this book provided something unique, which is a look into the way high level executives think about Agile.
This book rapidly cuts through the layers of confusion surrounding Agile development and focuses on what you “NEED” to know. Dr. Gat’s vast experience shines through as he elegantly simplifies the process.
Israel’s experience and wisdom in transforming a software development culture in a very large multi-site virtual team environment is well captured… Israel has done a great job in transforming his experience into a guide. That is the beauty of the book.
This is the “must-read” book if you’re an executive charged with Agile transformation, product development, or business strategy. The insights from Gat cover all three. Most companies talk a good Agile game. If you want results, however, please pay heed to the advice in this book.
The book will help you to flexibly navigate the hurdles inherent in selling and succeeding with Agile in your business: i.e. existing methodologies, outsourcing, diverse geographies, resistance to change, and the rest. They are all explained here by someone who has apparently already successfully fought the battles. A great read!
He has been there, and this book shares the unique insights of a senior manager who guided a large organization through the change process. If you are in this seat in your organization then this book is for you.
Israel distills his broad experience and many years of wisdom rolling out Agile into a succinct overview that is deep in knowledge, but accessible.
I’ve been a fan of Israel’s “The Agile Executive” blog for some time and had high hopes for this book… and the book didn’t disappoint!
While I was looking for answers; what I found instead was much more interesting. Israel was able to collect all the wisdom of doing large scale agile rollouts into one document, highlighting the geographic features along the way. That is a lot harder to do than simply proclaiming one correct path, and, speaking from experience, more helpful to the reader than they know.
You can read the full reviews here.
Balancing Agile – Guest Post by Alan Shalloway
A fascinating difference exists between Agile and Business Service Management (BSM). Agile emphasizes continuous flow of value to the customer. In contrast, BSM focuses on the business – it aligns the deliverables of IT to the enterprise’s business goals. Subtle that the difference might be, the two methods evolved along quite different lines in spite of the common denominator – dealing with software.
In this guest post, Alan Shalloway – Founder and CEO of NetObjectives – discusses the implications of focusing on the business as distinct from focusing on the customer. His discussion is part of a few thought-provoking threads he weaves around the Agile Manifesto. Alan perceives the Manifesto a product of the times. He thinks aloud whether today’s circumstances require a revised manifesto.
Alan is a man of passion. While I do not always agree with him, I have a lot of respect for his quest to find the deeper truths. Furthermore, I always learn from him. Whether you agree or disagree with the opinion Alan articulates in this post, “listening” to his thoughts is well worth your time.
Here is Alan:
The Agile Manifesto was a watershed event that has forever changed the landscape of software development. So profound a positive impact of it has had, that few challenge whether it was actually correct. Manifestos are often a statement in reaction to something prevalent that needs changing. This makes them very topical and temporal – and the exact intention needs to be restated when the landscape against which it was drawn has changed. The Agile Manifesto[1] states:
“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a planThat is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.”At the time of its edict, this was profound and well stated. Too many software teams were:
- Following a process dictated to them from outside their team
- Managing according to an extensive set of artifacts that recorded where they supposedly were well before software existed
- Were given a set of requirements to meet with little opportunity to discuss real needs (note, points 3 and 4 in the manifesto address this point in two ways – first recognizing that customer collaboration is necessary to discover their true needs and second that it is essential to take advantage of newly discovered information)
The manifesto represented a new paradigm from which to work – one in which the team would have better control over its destiny and where it was recognized that one had to make incremental, iterative movement towards one’s goals – both in discovering the true goal and in implementing it.
Unfortunately, the perspective from which the manifesto was created, or at least the methods which first followed the manifesto, have been extremely team centric. Not a surprise, given the paradigm at the time gave development teams too little say in their own methods. The impact of this has been, not surprisingly, success at the teams and difficult beyond the team. It is almost axiomatic now that companies will have successful team pilots only to bog down in their enterprise agile adoption efforts or even revert back to earlier methods.
I say “not surprisingly” because several things have been left out of the agile manifesto. These are:
- The role of management
- The role of process
- The role of planning
- And indirectly, the role of guiding principles
It could also be said that the driver for agile development is misplaced. I do not believe “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” This makes software groups customer driven, not business driven.
There is a subtle, but important difference. Basically, conscious or not, the Agile Manifesto is driven with a team-centric view of satisfying customers – business and management play mostly secondary roles. Unfortunately, there is a significant difference between customer driven and business driven (see the figure entitled Alignment with Vision of Business to the right). This is not apparent at the team level (the team is supposed to satisfy the customer). But definitely at the business level. Not surprising, however, since the manifesto is a team perspective it states things in terms of customer value.
Ironically, it is the over-focus on the team, however, that is robbing teams of one of their greatest tools. Clearly any method must have respecting people and providing those doing the work the ability to choose how they do their work. But this does not mean that process isn’t essential or that attending to certain laws of software development is optional. Rather it means that process can’t be imposed on teams since to do so would both rob them of respect and almost certainly be the wrong way to do things – who knows more about how to get work done than the people doing the work themselves?
But “Individuals over process” as the first line has come to be called, makes it sound like people are it. I do not think so – and I think this mindset has caused a lot of damage in many ways.
There is great evidence that the best approach is not merely get smart people onto a team and have them figure out how to solve their problems. They must be properly equipped to do so. Just being smart doesn’t mean you can solve the challenges facing you. This should be readily apparent, but in many ways, the Agile community has mostly ignored it. Actually, there is not really an Agile community any more – there are factions that have significantly different beliefs. For example, XP has long recognized the need for technical practices in Agile while the Scrum community is only just starting to get into what these are.
However, except for the Lean/Kanban community, few Agilists seem to espouse discovering and following the laws of product development flow (or even recognize their existence). This, in my mind, has led to the low rate of success in scaling Scrum to the enterprise*[2]. Ironically, it is the over-focus on people that leads many in the Scrum community to assert this lack of success is a lack willingness to take the effort to improve. This is not surprising – if it’s up to the team to succeed, then when they don’t it must be something wrong with the team or their management when they fail. I think not. I think it is the lack of understanding of the principles of software development flow.
These laws are not new. Don Reinertsen, in his iconic book Managing the Design Factory lays out much of the rules of product development. His more recent book The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development he lays out 175 of these principles.
To me, true respect for people means that one must equip them with what they need to get their job done. Our thinking in the Agile community should change from “People over process” to one of “People times process.[3]” This phrase emphasizes that if either are low, you get a low productivity. Process does not ensure success. But a poor process requires heroes to succeed. We’d like good, motivated, well-intentioned people to be able to succeed.
Our new agile perspective needs to include an understanding of what teams need to know to do their work. This opens up a role for managers to actively help teams get their job done and to coach them when they have challenges or lose their way. While I will always be thankful for the Agile Manifesto, I am looking for a Business Agile Manifesto that will expand the focus from the team to the entire enterprise.
Footnotes:
[1] http://www.agilemanifesto.org
[2] Ken Schwaber, iconic leader of the Scrum community has said that “I estimate that 75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope for from it.”
[3] I first heard this from Don Reinertsen. Before that I used to say “People plus process.”
And Now the Bottle-neck is in Operations
In his forthcoming Agile Austin presentation, colleague and friend Michael Cote will be discussing velocity in Agile development vis-a-vis velocity in IT operations. To quote Cote:
Technologies used by public web companies and now cloud computing are looking to offer a new way to deliver applications by addressing deployment and provisioning concerns. Agile software development has sped up the actual development of software, and now the bottle-neck is in operations who’re not always able to deploy software at the same velocity that Agile teams ship code. What do these technologies look like, are they realistic, and how might they affect your organization?
The topic is important from a few perspectives, such as the new business models it enables. With Agile infrastructure, a closed loop is formed between vendor and customer. This loop operates on the basis of close to real-time feedback. The new functionality in the software deployed in the afternoon could be in response to a specific need that was brought up in the morning. Hence, the business focus and the business design change from software that has already been developed and tested (‘done done’) but not yet delivered, to one that has been developed, tested and deployed (‘done done done’) in ultra fast way.
It should also be pointed out that the line between developing content and developing software gets really blurry nowadays. From a company perspective both software and contents are entities that are being made available for dissemination. If you accept the premise that the generation of content and development of the corresponding software should be done under a unified Agile model, the desirability, the power and the benefits of managing development and delivery in unison become obvious. When applied to both content and software, an agile infrastructure paradigm could easily transform the publishing industry, and others.
In short, the business benefits Agile Infrastructure begets trump the (very significant) operational benefits it enables.
The Changing Nature of Innovation: Part I — New Forms of Experimentation
Colleague Christian Sarkar drew my attention to two recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) articles that shed light on the way(s) innovation is being approached nowadays. To the best of my knowledge, none of the two articles has been written by an author who is associated with the Agile movement. Both, if you ask me, would have resonated big time with the authors of the Agile Manifesto.
The February 2009 HBR article How to Design Smart Business Experiments focuses on data-driven decisions as distinct from decisions taken based on “intuition”:
Every day, managers in your organization take steps to implement new ideas without having any real evidence to back them up. They fiddle with offerings, try out distribution approaches, and alter how work gets done, usually acting on little more than gut feel or seeming common sense—”I’ll bet this” or “I think that.” Even more disturbing, some wrap their decisions in the language of science, creating an illusion of evidence. Their so-called experiments aren’t worthy of the name, because they lack investigative rigor. It’s likely that the resulting guesses will be wrong and, worst of all, that very little will have been learned in the process.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Thanks to new, broadly available software and given some straightforward investments to build capabilities, managers can now base consequential decisions on scientifically valid experiments. Of course, the scientific method is not new, nor is its application in business. The R&D centers of firms ranging from biscuit bakers to drug makers have always relied on it, as have direct-mail marketers tracking response rates to different permutations of their pitches. To apply it outside such settings, however, has until recently been a major undertaking. Any foray into the randomized testing of management ideas—that is, the random assignment of subjects to test and control groups—meant employing or engaging a PhD in statistics or perhaps a “design of experiments” expert (sometimes seen in advanced TQM programs). Now, a quantitatively trained MBA can oversee the process, assisted by software that will help determine what kind of samples are necessary, which sites to use for testing and controls, and whether any changes resulting from experiments are statistically significant.
On the heels of this essay on how one could attain and utilize experimentally validated data, the October 2009 HBR article How GE is Disrupting Itself discusses what is already happening in the form of Reverse Innovation:
- The model that GE and other industrial manufacturers have followed for decades – developing high-end products at home and adapting them for other markets around the world – won’t suffice as growth slows in rich nations.
- To tap opportunities in emerging markets and pioneer value segments in wealthy countries, companies must learn reverse innovation: developing products in countries like China and India and then distributing them globally.
- While multinationals need both approaches, there are deep conflicts between the two. But those conflicts can be overcome.
- If GE doesn’t master reverse innovation, the emerging giants could destroy the company.
It does not really matter whether you are a “shoe string and prayer” start-up spending $500 on A/B testing through Web 2.0 technology or a Fortune 500 company investing $1B in the development and introduction of a new car in rural India in order to “pioneer value segments in wealthy countries.” Either way, your experimentation is affordable in the context of the end-result you have in mind.
Fast forward to Agile methods. The chunking of work to two-week segments makes experimentation affordable – you cancel an unsuccessful iteration as needed and move on to work on the next one. Furthermore, you can make the go/no-go decision with respect to an iteration based on statistically significant “real time” user response. This closed-loop operational nimbleness and affordability , in conjunction with a mindset that considers a “failure” of an iteration as a valuable lesson to learn from, facilitates experimentation. Innovation simply follows.
The Case for Agile Business Service Management
BSM Review has just published my article The Case for Agile Business Service Management. Here is a key para from the article:
During turbulent times such as the past year, Agile business service management enables the business to become more competitive by speeding up the pace of delivery of new functionality and accommodating changes in business requirements as part of standard operating procedures. Like a computer chess program that extends clever tactics into the strategic realm [The New Yorker 2005], it compensates for the lack of prolonged periods of techno-economic stability through business Agility, substituting speed, flexibility and momentum for traditional long range planning. It is particularly noteworthy that Agile business service management applies equally well to companies pursuing adaptive strategies as to those betting on shaping strategies [Hagel et al 2008].
As indicated in a previous post, the article outlines the research agenda I will be pursuing. Specifically:
- How is agile BSM implemented and delivered? …measured?
- What are the benefits of agile BSM to the business objectives of development? …ops? …test?
- Who carriers responsibility for agile BSM delivery and implementation?
- Who benefits from agile BSM delivery & implementation?
- How are these benefits applied?
- When is Agile BSM expected to be understood and accepted by the business entities?
- Where is agile BSM likely to be wholeheartedly implemented first?
- What is the impact of Agile BSM on ISV’s (as distinct from IT “shops”)?
Listeners to Live Recording of Four Principles, Four Culture, One Mirror are well aware of my view of scaling downstream – it is the most tricky of the three dimensions of Agile scaling (up, out, downstream). IMHO Agile BSM is the first step toward effective scaling downstream.
Think About Pilot Teams, not Pilot Projects – Guest Post by Alan Atlas
Rally’s Alan Atlas shares with us his insights on picking a pilot project for Agile. His post nicely complements the account Sue McKinney and Pollyanna Pixton gave about their approach to bootstrapping Agile at IBM (click here). It also touches on some of the points made in our post The First Decision to Make. Whether you agree or disagree with Alan, his thoughts are always intriguing. You will find additional insights by Alan in The Scrum Mechanic.
Alan has been professionally involved in high tech for nearly thirty years. His career spans top technology companies such as Bell Labs and Amazon as well as various intriguing start-ups. He brought to market numerous products, including OSF Motif and Amazon’s S3. His passion for Scrum has recently led him to make a career switch into full-time Agile Coaching and Training with Rally Software.
Here is Alan:
Picture this: You’re an Agile Coach and you arrive for the first day of your new, monster engagement at a large enterprise that has hired you to help them become Agile. You’re very excited as you walk into your first training session with a select group of employees. As you start the training, you are greeted with questions from your happy, excited audience. “Can we get this over with early?” “I don’t want to be here. My manager said I had to come.” “What is this all about, anyway?” “I have a friend who got fired for advocating Scrum. I don’t want anything to do with it.” “Why am I here?” Is this any way to start an Agile transformation?
A necessary step in Agile adoptions is picking where to start. Consultants often help management or transition teams with the selection of so-called pilot projects. Project teams are then notified that they are the lucky winners in the Scrum Lottery. The result can be a (not entirely incorrect) feeling amongst employees that they are being forced to become Agile, which can lead to the scene I just described.
This command-and-control (C&C) approach can easily erode trust, destroy motivation and handicap an adoption program because it ignores the critical contribution that team buy-in and ownership can make toward successful implementation of the new development process. At best, it leaves a mild bad taste in the mouths of the employees and gives them a good reason to believe that this Scrum thing is just another management flavor of the week. At worst, it removes the single most important success factor in Agile adoption: the active and enthusiastic participation of the team.
Is there a reasonable way to avoid the pitfalls of the C&C approach and still meet the legitimate needs of management? Can we start a transformation with excited, enthusiastic employees instead of sullen ones? Can management make a decision to ‘go Agile’ and still establish a collaborative relationship with employees? Can we take advantage of the inherent appeal of Agile methods to increase our chances of success? I think the answer to all of these is, “Yes!”
Agile’s people-based approach tells us to view the world from a team-centric point of view and not a project-centric point of view. Applying this to our Agile transition itself, we realize that we don’t need to assign Scrum to projects. Instead, we can let teams choose to adopt Scrum (or not to adopt, to be fair). It’s the team that will make the Agile process work and lead to success, not the project itself. This approach will maximize the likelihood of success by finding the teams that want to make it work.
The way to ensure the success of early Agile transformation efforts and simultaneously to align management and employees without coercion is to provide teams with the permission and knowledge to make their own decisions, and then for management to support those decisions. Teams that choose to ‘go Agile’ will make it work. Teams that are told to ‘go Agile’ might or might not make it work.
Implementing this isn’t hard. Start by making introductory Agile training available to the target organization (a few two-hour classes spread throughout a week is a good start for all but the largest organizations). Announce that teams are welcome to try Scrum, and tell them how to request further team training and coaching (don’t neglect to make sure their immediate management is on board). There might be reasons to give priority to certain teams and possibly to delay others, but in general the teams that want to do Agile should be allowed to do it. The company is now supporting and leveraging teams that want to transition to Agile and allowing those that don’t want to change to continue as they are. This in itself is an important message to all that the Agile philosophy is being taken seriously by management.
The result of using this approach is that there is no bad taste among employees, the most enthusiastic teams self-select to participate in the new experiment, nobody is forced, and management demonstrates its willingness to support employees in the new endeavor.
No managers were harmed in the filming of this scenario. 🙂 Seriously, we put the focus on teams without negating any of the needs of the enterprise. The ability of teams to get further training can still be managed. The identities of the teams can be known so that there can be followup assessments, monitoring, and support. In the cases where it is necessary, teams that have interdependencies or other complexities can be staged appropriately. The biggest and most important difference between this scenario and the more traditional C&C scenario is that here the teams that are excited and interested about Agile become the first in the water.
Using this method for starting your transition doesn’t change anything else about your organizational Agile initiative. You still have all of the cultural, technical, engineering, management, organizational, and human issues to deal with. It just gives you a way to pick the starting point in a more positive and Agile way.
Enterprise Product: $50,000 and 8 months – You must be kidding!
With the successful release of Enterprise Profile Management 1.0, I asked Nick Beaugeard – Founder and Managing Director of HubOne – to capture and share with us his Agile development experience. Some of the threads he describes might have been mentioned in other posts in this blog. Others, like “Invest in your method and tools before you hire people, not after you hire people!”, appear for the first time. Whether mentioned here before or not, the ‘secret sauce’ is Nick’s ability to pull so many threads together. The power of so doing is nicely expressed in Nick’s guest post below.
Nick’s been involved in Tech for 27 years (if you include the games he wrote for the Apple II aged 9) and has been involved with companies like Microsoft, CSC, JP Morgan and many others. He’s also ran a number of start-ups, from web 2.0 to services to solutions companies and has been successful with a number of those. Nick has a passion for all things Agile, but prefers to design the methodology to suit the purpose, rather than rely on a one size fits all method. Notwithstanding this, Nick has some notoriety within Dimension Data for passionately changing solution development from failing waterfall to a test based development approach, suiting solutions and services.
Nick lives on Sydney’s northern beaches with his wife, four kids, two mice and a framed copy of the fabled W.W. Royce “waterfall” speech to the IEEE.
Here is Nick:
I’ve ran start-ups before. I’ve even managed the development of products before, but this is the first time I’ve set up a start-up with the sole goal of developing a product and bringing it to market. Thinking back on the last 8 months, I’m not sure I’d have taken the challenge on in retrospect, but we did, and we succeeded and so in this post, I’d like to share with you how a micro-startup with a budget of $50,000 can design, develop, release and certify an Enterprise quality product without going both broke or mad….
During my career, which spans everything from support, through solutions and has a great deal of focus on Systems Management, I’ve been constantly frustrated by something which should be really simple, how to find people with specific skills or responsibility. Seeing that the problem still existed, I set out to build a solution which would attempt to solve such a problem.
The first step on the road was to meet with potential customers. At this stage, I had barely a germ of an idea. It could be written in 20pt type on a single piece of paper. Nevertheless, I met with over 20 different potential customers and attempted to pitch the “solution” to them. The feedback I got was extensive, but the main and core piece of information was that the solution had value and merit and if we could deliver then these customers might just buy the software. I even went as far as to ask them how much they’d pay for such a solution and got a fairly consistent figure of about $20 per year per user.
I realised at once that the problem I was trying to solve was not a database problem. In fact it was a directory problem so I set about investigating whether I could produce a solution using an LDAP directory.
Right at the beginning, though, I made an investment in tools. I implemented great source control, issue management, task management and a build platform, just like I was in a huge team.
I also made sure I adhered to issue and task management and made sure that I was forced to complete the criteria for each check-in. I know that sounds stupid, and it must have seemed so… The CEO of a start-up assigning himself issues only to resolve them on check-in. However I believed it to be easier to implement the processes I wanted before I had a team on board, demonstrate me using them and it would be WAY easier to get the team to use them!
To test if my architectural hypotheses was correct, I wrote a very, very basic API. This small piece of code was able to perform some CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete) operations on my own custom directory objects.
Let’s read the above again… See I had no spec, some interesting comments from customers and just went ahead and wrote a prototype API. Next I wrote some Unit tests which exercised the API and went back to my customers to see if I was on the right track.
That bit was tough. It takes a fair amount of imagination to see a simple set of unit tests and then extrapolate that to a completed product. However my friendly customer s were very patient as I explained that a response of “Passed” actually meant what I just explained had happened.
Once again that feedback helped and I felt confident enough to prototype most of the API and almost completely complete the schema. Once again I created a bunch of unit tests, but this time I focussed on the core scenarios as discussed with our customers.
Still at this stage, we had spent almost nothing, had a good, working and testable prototype API and a schema which worked.
It was then time to go and get a couple of developers. I knew a couple of my close colleagues had just resigned from another company so I asked them if they’d come and work for me, at a vastly reduced rate, for some stock in my new start-up.
Just the stage for a spec, huh? We’ve now got more than one developer so obviously need to write down then entire goal of the solution…
I thought not. My API was just a prototype and needed to be secured, consolidated, better documented, globalized and tested for performance and the unit tests demonstrated exactly how things should work. My new, fresh team set to work on tidying up and completing the API, working on issues and tasks and performing check ins. They also got told whenever they broke a build.
We were then seriously thinking about building a web services layer. This had several advantages, not the least being that we could support clients on multiple platforms. However, I was still a little uncomfortable with my API hypotheses and really wanted to build a client that exercised the entire API before we invested in SOAP and web services.
Therefore we set the challenge and therefore the scope of version 1. Version 1.0 would deliver a server (LDAP with an Installer) and a client (Windows XP and above) which talked to the LDAP server using our API.
That made the next challenge was the UI. This is a problem for me as I’m not one for having any design skills at all. However I could have sat down and tediously wire framed every screen and interaction I and my customers wanted.
However I knew a better wireframing tool – the IDE we used to write code instead. I sat down and started to craft a UI, using a lot of trial and error. In 7 days, I had a UI which exercised the main aspects of the API and the code base…
And that’s how our development stayed, I’d prototype (wireframe with code) a feature and the devs would then go and finish it.
We found bugs in the API, sure, but never needed to write new API methods to make the client work.
In the final weeks, we just worked on testing and fixing bugs… The test plan you ask? – Well that was the user guide! A full test pass meant running through each page in the user guide and doing everything it said.
A recent code review showed there was none of my prototype code left in the platform, but it didn’t matter. We shipped the product and spent less than the $50,000.
In conclusion our method was:
· Speak to your customers. Not lots, all the time!
· Invest in your method and tools before you hire people, not after you hire people!
· Make the software function, before you spend time making a UI function.
· Continuously test, fix and test again and don’t be afraid to throw prototypes away.
Last Friday we released version 1.0, go download it, you be the judge of how we did!
Threads from Washington, DC
Rally’s July 23 Agile Success Tour in Washington, DC was somewhat unique demographically. About 50% of participants work for the government. Moreover, many of the commercial enterprises represented in the event derive a significant amount of their revenues from federal government contracts. The Agile challenges encountered by these folks reflect practices that are not necessarily applicable to “pure” commercial environment. For example, one of the participants asked me about Agile for a project of 500 developers/testers in which her company is the prime contractor for 100 subcontractors! (Recommendation: must devise a business design enabling her company to profitably invest in laying a joint Agile infrastructure across all these subcontractors. Such infrastructure leads to standardization of the Agile data. Click here for details).
In spite of the different demographics, most of the Agile issues brought up in DC were quite similar to those expressed in previous Agile Success Tour events. The bureaucracy with which various Agile champions in DC need to deal with might be stricter (due to security/confidentiality aspects of much of the development carried out in DC), but the underlying needs and dynamics are not really different from those in other cities in which Success Tour events were held.
Here is a sample of enlightening threads I listened to or participated in during the event:
- The business fabric has not quite caught up with Agile methods. In particular, Agile contracts are not yet where they need to be. The costs associated with “ECOing the contract” each time a change in requirements is made offset the methodical benefits of Agile. We need to find a way to “encode” Agile principles in contracts.
- In pitching software methods to their executives, Agile champions need to go beyond the benefits of Agile. Risk and risk mitigation are of equal importance. See The View from the Executive Suite for detailed guidance on the subject.
- The benefits of Agile have to be expressed in terms of the business of the business. One has to go beyond capturing “just” the operational benefits and address financial and business benefits. Peter Drucker’s famous quip “Companies make shoes!” applies. Click here for examination of the quip in the Agile context.
- Innovation through affordable experimentation is an Agile benefit that is under-represented in many discussions Agile champions hold. See the new edition of Jim Highsmith‘s Agile Project Management for an excellent discussion of this critical benefit.
- Agile is about uncertainty, not about complexity. To demonstrate the power of Agile, choose a project of high uncertainty. Complexity in such a project depends on your risk tolerance – it could be either low or high. Be aware that various issues related to complexity might manifest themselves on the surface as process issues. See Uncertainty, Complexity, Correctness for an in-depth discussion of the subject.
Next stops of the Agile Success Tour “train” are in Boston, Chicago, Seattle and London. Stay tuned…
The Agile Executive 