Last week I taught an introductory course on Agile Work. Normally this is pretty easy stuff. However, I was teaching this course in Bucharest, Romania (cool), and I have come across a substantial, strong and vigorous objection to agile (also cool, but challenging too). Several people in my class are asserting that agile is just like communism and since communism failed, agile is not likely to succeed either. I’m looking for help on this!
Thanks to Deborah Hartmann who pointed out these links:
Perception of Time
Timeless Time
Personally, I’m strongly on the side of “polychronic”… and I’m being strongly encouraged to move to a more “monochronic” approach to time management. All my life I have struggled with calendars, PDAs etc. We’ll see how it goes!
Here’s a slightly off-topic, but nevertheless excellent read: “The Inner Ring” by C S Lewis. This is a talk given by C S Lewis to what seems to be a group of university students. In it, he describes the notion of the inner ring and the desire to be “in”. It is amazing how much our culture in North America and our corporate culture is driven by this desire. I’ll leave it to you to decide if this is good or bad.
It occurred to me to ask: If the “invisible hand” in the free markets of capitalism is making for efficient markets, efficient work… then why is there some much room for improvement when we start using non-competitive, collaborative techniques such as lean and agile?
And if these collaborative techniques work on a small scale to improve efficiency, does this mean that we could do this across organizations as a “replacement” for capitalism somehow?
In agile methods, we “assume positive intent” on the part of individuals. What if we could do this across organizations? I’m not living in a dream world yet, but I think I have an inkling of what it might look like: Toyota and its collaborative, leaned-out supply chain.
Recently, Dimitri Zimine wrote an excellent little story about context switching. Joel Spolsky writes in “From the ‘You Call this Agile’ Department“:
Dmitri is only looking at one side of the cost/benefit equation. He’s laid out a very convincing argument why Sarah should not interrupt her carefully planned two week iteration, but he hasn’t even mentioned arguments for the other side: the important sale that will be lost.
Okay… I’ll bite.
I have now trained over one hundred people in my Agile Project Managmenet / ScrumMaster Certification course. I’m starting to see and hear some of the results of this training. There are a couple specific “smells” that I have become aware of.
Starting off on the right foot is just as important as it ever was. However, with Agile Work, this takes on a significantly different meaning than it does in other methods as the emphasis of what is “right” is also significantly different. This is a short guide on how to successfully launch a team using Agile Work.
Agile Work consists of seven core practices. These practices form a solid starting point for any person, team or community that wishes to follow the Middle Way to Excellence.
In agile development circles self-organizing teams are all the rage nowadays. And I often hear people bemoaning the “evil managers”. And no doubt in many circumstances and organizations there is real work to do here and real dysfunction to resolve. But I’m less concerned with the analysis of what’s wrong and more concerned with what can we do differently and better. IE: How can we develop the skills necessary to practice effective self-organization.
So what does it mean to be a participant in a “leaderful” group?
A friend of mine, Bettina Grassmann, has written a very insightful short piece on consensus called “Consensus Killed the Cat“. I have a few additional comments to make to connect what she has written with Agile Work.
I recently completed reading An Introduction to General Systems Thinking
Sometimes an agile team is innundated (or maybe just slightly distracted) by requests for individuals on the team to do work for people or groups outside the team’s official stakeholders. This can happen, for example, in a corporate culture that promotes the exchange of favors. This past weekend at our Agile Coach’s gathering, Deborah Hartmann shared her method of detecting, exposing and discouraging this unofficial work.
The coach’s gathering last weekend also got me thinking about the ethics of Agile Work and coaching. Is it okay to use agile methods for destructive purposes?
In Jean Tabaka’s new book, “Collaboration Explained : Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders
Every once in a while the del.icio.us tag for Agile turns up something really interesting. This evening, I found this article about the ongoing use of the term “Agile”. The article is brief and a little weak, but it brings up a concern that is always niggling in the back of my mind. Interestingly enough, a good friend of mine, Christian Gruber, emailed me another web page of similar import…