I will not claim to be a religious individual, but an associate referred me to the Serenity Prayer – more commonly known as the Alcholics Anonymous prayer – as an effective mindset for a change agent. [Read more...]
Where’s the Beef? Agile PowerPoints of Points of Power?
October 22, 2008 By Leave a Comment
I guess the most recent spamit was ‘that straw’. Some beltway bandit spending a lot of flash money to make it sound like they had ‘the answer’ for a mere $500 and your soul to some highly regarded, deeply entrenched, piece of BDUF tool. I do not doubt for a second they will be successful on this side of the chasm, because we all buy into the notion that if it is in a PowerPoint, then it must be true. What a line of preprocessed plant food comes out of those projectors these days. There was a time when the Agile community had stuff to say because everything that was talked about was based on experience not on flights of logical fantasy. Gee we even had a name for it – hmm how that go, Empirical versus Deductive analysis. [Read more...]
Organizational Debt
October 8, 2008 By 1 Comment
Working on an ongoing development project, one becomes familiar with the idea of technical debt very quickly. While many definitions abound, the best analogy I have heard is to compare technical debt to a financial debt. It may get you something faster in the short term, but eventually it will need to be repaid and with interest! Indeed, the current turmoil in the market shows just how devastating mismanaged debt can truly be. Fighting cultural dysfunction that allows technical debt to accumulate is a major challenge a scrum master faces. [Read more...]
The Enterprise Agile Framework Illusion
October 8, 2008 By 5 Comments
“The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they’re organized for.”
-Laura Ingalls Wilder
Nearly every large organization does it. Just when we think we’ve learned…made an impact…demonstrated that success is possible on large projects in massive organizations riddled with problems…the need to control takes over, and lessons are lost. Outdated management theory that has stifled innovation in our businesses for decades is reapplied.
