You shouldn’t be surprised by this.  Agile is in need of Architecture but you have to seriously question how we are going about adapting and inspecting the role of the Agile Architect in meeting that need.  Funny thing is that it may be due to the fact that mainstream Agile thinking is wrapped around Agile as a small team of hardy souls bringing joy to the masses and angst to ‘the man’.

When you live where we do, working with huge organizations spending enormous sums of money so that hundreds and even thousands of people can build, support, train, maintain, and even (gasp) plan how to handle the information needs of millions of people as they; trade at a local, regional, national, and international level concurrently; seek, provide, research, pay for healthcare;  protect/defend their person, family, home, community, nation, world from threats of others or their own environmental actions; and even download upload whatever they find entertaining in this world; when you live on this side of hill, architecture is at the core of being Agile.  And for the most part, we suck at making it great.  Why is that? more »

Yes…coaching has some really important benefits in helping organizations adopt Agile methods, Lean, <insert process improvement of your choice here>.  This is especially true in large, complex organizations with deeply-traditional cultures that seem resistant to change.

Are you considering a coach?

If you aren’t, are you putting your organization and projects at risk?

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I have been going back in forth with several coworkers on two seemingly contradictory points. We want to see teams self-organize and take personal ownership for what they do and how they do it. Simultaneously, most teams can’t seem to make the leap at first. As Jeff Sutherland has proposed, sometime teams need “Shock Therapy” to become effective Agile teams. Yet this seems counter intuitive to the idea of self managing teams. By definition, does the jump start actually impede the team from achieving self-sufficiency. How does an organization know when structure is needed for a team or when it is ready to move on it’s own?

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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. more »

Of all the virtues within Agile software development, none are more important than the numerous means of receiving feedback layered into the entire Agile life cycle. The team shares a quick checkpoint at the daily stand up, the scrum master fosters earnest discussions of team effectiveness with periodic retrospectives, project stakeholders can clearly see and interact with potentially shippable code at regularly occurring show and tells and ultimately the entire community can offer feedback due to frequent releases. This is a powerful cycle as early and frequent feedback can help move a product in a positive direction, keep a team excited, and ultimately lead to more business value. But this entire structure is predicated upon the team receiving valuable and relevant feedback. Having such a structure is not enough, we need to make sure the quality of our feedback loops is sufficient too. more »

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. more »

“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.

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