I have spent a good portion of the last 15 years trying to go back to the future. For the first 15 years I worked in companies where Quality was paramount and their common approach shaped my thinking and actions. Names like Fisher Price, Parker Brothers, Eastman Kodak, Wang Word Processing, speak to the power and importance of quality. With their respective demise I also learned another important lesson about quality. It is not just about how well the product is built. It is the value the product adds to a customer’s quality of life that separates a fad from a staple. This, it turns out, is the one item I have found that moves business and management to understand the importance – to their success – of having quality at the front of the train. more »

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. more »

This post is an excerpt from an on-going conversation at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/agileleadership.

I have been asking for comments and perspectives about leadership, traditional management, Agile Leadership and so on.  The thread is well received and i wanted to bring this element to this community as it begins to address places where all sides seem to converge.

Glen Alleman wrote:

I’ve started speaking of non-agile project management is bad (or poor) project management, since responding to the emerging situation is part of good project management – as defined in PMBOK. Therefore not responding is bad. I’ve started using “conventional” to distinguish the processes used in many locations to great success. Agile and Conventional are certainly different. Non-agile is non-functional and therefore a nonstarter for success.

Ron Jeffries responded:

Would that more people believed that.

From my perspective;

I think Agilists differ from conventionalists in that they put Respect and Leadership over Rank and Management, and make this distinction transparent.

Perhaps one of the key attributes of an Agile Leadership environment is the passing of the leadership position to the person the team trusts most to address the issue. This fluidity, seen in ‘self organization’, pair programming, and most dynamically in planning sessions seems to become the bonding agent of the team.

Now does this translate into organizations. I think the answer is yes, but the result is a new management process that goes to the top of the management and stakeholder organization. We have mentioned “Corps Business” and some of us have delved into OODA, the three block war, and I have seen some organizations make steps toward this.

What I think I am seeing is the trust component of leadership and followership extend into the management of the organization and manifest itself in Management retain Control of the plan and teams of people at the lowest level in the organization take over Command of the situation. The Middle part of the organization exists to serve both those above and those below by clearly defining, the mission statement and the commander’s intent; advising those above on the capabilities and limitations in meeting those statements and intents and removing the impediments facing the teams as well as shepherding the solutions to the needs and requests of the team as they encounter unpredicted, emergent challenges.