Between these presentations and my daily coaching practice, I am reminded yet again at the importance of forming a good scrum team. This, along with proper backlog compilation and maintenance, can make the difference between success and endless frustration. In my experience, proper scrum team formation is the area where companies who are unsuccessful in Agile transformations fail most often.
So when my friend mentioned that a good indicator for agile transformation success was a company had hit rock bottom I knew exactly what he was referring to. In this particular case he used the examples of the FBI Sentinel Project and Healthcare.gov website debacle. In both cases, it wasn’t until each was a total disaster that Agile was actually tried with any seriousness and rigor and in both cases the results were amazing.
I am often faced with explaining the various aspects of Agile to people new to Agile and I have come up with a very simple way to remember (and explain) Agile. I present to you now the “3Ps of Agile Software Development” with the hope you find this useful to your own understanding and an aid in your ability to explain Agile to others.
This particular problem manifests when a company desires the potential benefits of Scrum without really understanding Scrum. Without a good understanding, people attempt to map their existing roles with those of Scrum. Let me make one thing perfectly clear. The role of Scrum Master is unique to Scrum and any attempt to map it to existing roles will only result in confusion, frustration and less than optimal outcomes.
While other scaling frameworks have detailed flowcharts, organizational structure documents, etc., Wagerfall avoids such complexities. Mindy Minter, Head Architect at Great Big Company, praises Wagerfall for its simplicity. “We are big believers in the KISS principle. You can’t get more KISS than Wagerfall. Pay your fee. Get your certification. Claim you’re Agile.”
As I think back on my coaching work in agile, the blogs I have written, the many discussions I have had and the presentations I have made, I think that all of these boil down into one very simple thing – my work is all about helping people understand the true nature of the software development business process and, thereby helping them to make better decisions.
One of the reasons I have proposed the concept of CAO (Chief Agile Officer) is for situations such as these where someone at the top level of the organization can arbitrate using the entire organizational as a lens to determine best courses of action. It sounds like you are both on the same organizational level so it would help to appeal to a higher management level in instances where two of the same level cannot come to a satisfactory conclusion.
One of the things I have noticed during this time is, as Agile (and especially Scrum) have become more mainstream, the quality of individuals calling themselves scrum masters and agile coaches has become more variable.
When someone mentions “waterfall has always worked for us”, I believe this is an example of Type Three error. The real question – has waterfall been optimal? The example I always give is that the covered wagon was successful for transportation, but when I look out the window of a plane, I don’t see any crossing the prairie. In the case of those applying the values and principles of agile properly there is little doubt as to which is the airplane and which is the covered wagon.
We call our new effort 10XP Solutions. “10X” comes from the well known adage that the best programmers are ten times more productive than the least. The “XP” alludes to Extreme Programming whose emphasis has always been on high quality code, something that is central to the value that we bring to our clients.