When your CIO thinks everything is fine, but you know it isn’t.

(How many times have we all seen this or experienced this situation?)

Agile allows everyone to win.

John the CIO thought everything was running smoothly, not perfectly but customers had stopped complaining and products were shipping on time for once. Re-org after re-org had finally brought some results. The developers/testers/project managers and business analysts were happy, or so he was told by the V.P. of Development to whom all departments reported. Everyone was solving problems and working together in the open and bright space. Disciplined process and structure were in place and demonstrated during executive and shareholder meetings using sharp power point presentations. Documentation, process and procedures were stored in shared repositories for all to see. More eloquent documentation you could not find.

Everyone agreed improvements needed to continue but the executive management team was elated. 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 »

“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  Outdated management theory that has stifled innovation in our businesses for decades is reapplied.

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There are so many well-thought out software development (SD) methods. They are laid out beautifully on paper- diagrams of traceability of activities and artifacts to take ideas from users’ minds all the way through product implementation and operation. Together with some templates, guidance, tools, training, and packaged together in a professional way, a software development method is born. more »

I first posted this on the yahoo scrumdevelopment group in a hope to stimulate some conversation – or at the very least, to stimulate a funny-bone or too. Not sure if I got there so I post it here as the maiden post of the BigVisible blog. May there be many more to come.

A little while ago, after returning from Agile 2006, I posted a remark about how the biggest threat to Agile is not the Pro-Waterfaller or the Anti-Agilist but rather the Crappy Agilist. Well, following some deep introspection and more »