Sean Buck of Capital Group and I did a talk at Agile2011 on the topic of organizational transformation – how a true agile transformation is holistic – it involves the entire company – and takes a long time – months and years in most large organizations. The deck is attached below. It may be tough to get the main points without the narration, so we are considering doing a webinar version. Post a comment if you are interested in this.
Some of the main points: [Read more...]
This is a simple experience, but I’ve felt compelled to share it and see if other have had a similar one. Simply stated, I’ve stopped using planning poker cards. It’s not that teams I work with don’t use planning poker, but that the cards were too much overhead. [Read more...]
PowerPoint (or Keynote, the Apple equivalent) is a great tool to work with, and disseminate distilled information, but not a good tool for learning, brainstorming, discovering. I still remember the last time I sat through a training session only to read at the bottom of the slides the dreaded words: “Page 1 of 367”… the collective groan in the room was palpable, and effectively severely diminished the learning environment the trainers were just starting to create. [Read more...]
At times both the Agile and traditional Waterfall camps get hung up in an unproductive game where they start digging through the details of a problem domain, find a specific circumstance and say, “ah ha! A purely [Agile / Waterfall] approach can’t deal with this situation, therefore that approach is wrong”
Indeed, this binary obsession – that you must pick one specific approach and apply it to all dimensions of a project – is entirely unproductive. In fact, it is usually not the reality in an Agile or traditional project, but rather a limit of our own thought process. The challenge being that if we find merit in one approach, the mind can take an absolutist value. Agile is useful for dealing with product visions, therefore we should apply Agile principles to every aspect of our project.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)
Fitzgerald accurately describes the challenge facing us when organizing and executing projects; we must hold two opposing ideas within our head and continue to function. These two opposing ideas well well described by Kevin Kelly when he coined the terms clockware and swarmware as the two different approaches to managing work. They have since been embraced by many complexity theorists and I present them here as my own attempt to hold two opposing ideas and continue to function and show how one builds upon the other, and to argue that a project requires one or the other will inevitably lead to failure. [Read more...]
I think most of us have heard the story about Thomas Edison a few hundred times:
When asked about why he failed to create a light bulb in 1,000 attempts, Edison allegedly replied, “I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb.”
Regardless of how many times I hear it, I always wonder the context it is being employed in and by whom. I am not always sure that the right insights are drawn by some of those quotes. One instance comes to mind in a conversation I had with someone while attending the Agile Coach Camp in Montreal 2011 (great fun!). Somehow the conversation made it from empiricism to efficiency and over to effectively managing people to make them more productive (!) before I could comprehend it all. I think my listening skills glitched for a minute; I never even saw this line coming. [Read more...]
I’ve been thinking recently about the various roles project stakeholders play, and how they may distort the environment around a project until that distortion in turn impacts the reality of the project. Let me offer two key examples. The first, coined by Scott Ambler, is known as greenshifting. In this case, the further information moves from the team, the better – hence “green” on a status report – the project looks. This is a common dynamic, one that most people have experienced first hand. The team members report out numerous challenges, which the project manager – who is there to make sure problems don’t emerge of course – puts as positive a spin on it as he can. This may get filtered up through any number of managers who need to present their work in the best light, such that a project under serious duress will appear to be in perfectly good shape. [Read more...]
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