Talk: Agile is a Dirty Word
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jimbobbirnie
Talk description
Title:
Agile is a Dirty Word
Short synopsis:
What does it tell you when a country has “Democratic” in its official name? What does it tell you when an organisation you land at tells you “We’ve been doing Agile for years”? You arrive with a mandate to transform and you find chaos. They think they are “doing Agile” but “it doesn’t work here”. They’ve “tried Kanban” and now they are in the middle of a “Scrum reset”. How do you persuade a whole organisation to embrace Agile when they already think Agile is a Dirty Word?
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Long synopsis (optional):
At ThoughtWorks we are often challenged to carry out an "Agile Transformation". Often "Agile" has become toxified by earlier badly managed attempts to "do Agile". Consultants have been hired, project managers (all Prince 2 certified no doubt) got sent for Scrum training and came back "Scrum certified" and rebranded themselves as Scrum masters. Hey presto! “We’re doing Agile!” Then they "tried to do Kanban but it won't work here" so then they realised that "we need to standardise our processes" so they get the most experienced Scrum master (i.e. the Project Manager most entrenched in the dogma of waterfall delivery that they learnt during their Prince 2 certification) to come up with a "Scrum reset process". A few months later, when still "Agile isn't working for us" they call ThoughtWorks in. What do we find? We find an organisation where scepticism about the ability of the technology group to deliver for the business has created a huge divide in the company. There is probably a blame culture and certainly no trust between "them" and "us". The business thinks it is failing because of technology. Technology knows the business needs to change too. All around is chaos, distrust, recriminations and above all, a chronic inability to return new value for customers. All around you, you can see that Agile is getting the blame. It doesn't matter that the situation hasn't changed for years. The latest new thing that was "done" was Agile, so it must be to blame. All of this means is that Agile is a Dirty Word. We know what good looks like and we know that good involves tech at core, an agile business and a lightweight Agile delivery process. But how do we get to good? How do we teach the whole organisation to be agile (not "do" Agile) when Agile is a Dirty Word? Based on my experience in 4 very different organisations working for ThoughtWorks I can provide some of the answers about dealing with this common situation, how to BE Agile when Agile is a Dirty Word.
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