Pragmatic Agilist

Pop culture aficionados will be familiar with the South Park " Underpants Gnomes ," who roam through people's homes stealing underwear in the night. Their business plan is classic and simple: http://www.queuefull.net/~bensons/2009/01/12/reflection-on-the-underpants-gnomes-master-plan/ Everyone likes a plan with three steps. I have been thinking a lot about the Underpants Gnomes lately, and here's why.  If you invert the first two phases, you get a pretty good model for tech-only agile: ??? Collect underpants Do Agile Technical Practices Profit It has the reassuring three steps, but something important is missing. Let's talk about the company which attempts to roll out agile with a primary focus on the technical practices.  That would be...almost the whole world.  Look at the first line of the Agile Manifesto --it says the goal is "working software," not "VALUABLE working software," although the v-word does come in at the top o...

"Oh for goodness sake, you put it in upside down!" "I'm sorry, Secret. I thought the pointy end went in first." -Secret Squirrel and Morrocco Mole, Secret Squirrel I'm always excited to learn something new, and this week a colleague introduced me to the " Lead/Lag " concept of measuring the performance of a change program such as an agile transformation.  He also introduced me to the "Secret Squirrel (and Morocco Mole)" Hannah-Barbera cartoon series from the 1960s, which briefly seemed to be a more interesting thing to discuss, but I'm pretty sure you guys should all pursue that on your own without further commentary from me.  We agilists are a fun bunch. From wikipedia Seriously, though, this Lead/Lag thing gets you exactly where you want to be as you design your agile transformation, and it keeps you from drowning in a pool of agile purism. "Is not Scrum/Is so Scrum" is not the discussion you want to be ha...

I was privileged to conduct a workshop yesterday at the Agile and Beyond Conference in Dearborn, Michigan, on how to be an enterprise Product Owner.  The deck is available here . Thanks to all who attended!

"And everyone likes a party/But no-one wants to clean" -Keb Mo, " Victims of Comfort " The concepts of "continuous feedback" and "continuous improvement" are central to agile and lean philosophy.  Esther Derby and Diana Larsen have a wonderful book entirely about team retrospectives .  "Inspect and adapt" itself,  the 12th principle underlying the Agile Manifesto , has been subject to inspection and adaptation and trumped by " Plan-Do-Check-Act ."  Teams, processes, work-in-progress--all are ideally subject to frequent observation and tuning. But what about the people?  As agilists (or non-agilists with common sense), we recognize that we succeed or fail based on the quality of the people and interactions on a team, regardless of the process followed.  If we are going to squeeze maximum value out of ourselves, shouldn't we be putting something in place to tune our people even before we tune our processes?  The grim ...

I got a tweet this morning about the new VersionOne " State of Agile Development Survey " in which the re-tweeter used hashtags like #shocking and #fail.  Looking for a good laugh, I clicked on over to the survey, and realized I #liked the survey and I thought it was #interesting and #helpful to me.  I didn't find anything that jumped out to me as a #failure in a particularly #horrifying way.  Then for a moment I thought maybe I am not one of the #Agile Cool Kids.  Of course the moment was brief and I bounced back quickly--please don't worry.  But as I thought it over, I realized I myself used the phrase "that's CRAZY" yesterday for a perfectly reasonable management reaction to a difficult personnel situation on a team. http://www.triumphtheinsultcomicdog.com/ Have you ever thought about how much elitism and scorn we carry around with us in the Agile world?  Every question becomes a target for someone to poop on, as Triumph the Insult Comic Dog w...

Agile purists may be frightened to learn that in many enterprise environments, one of the first steps executive management may take towards agile adoption may be to establish an official agile SDLC process, and to post a diagram representing the process, along with its artifact templates, in some prominent place on the company web site.  There will be 3-D box diagrams and arrows on it for sure, along with many links and appendices.  The diagrams and artifact templates themselves will go through weeks or months of review before central posting, not to mention what will theoretically happen if your project adheres to the highly edited result. One might think that leading with the official SDLC would seem to defeat the whole point of "self organization." Plus, one further conjectures, the kind of people who want to push agile from the top are just the ones who want to commit other anti-agile atrocities such as requiring an audit trail of changes to the plan or forbidding team...

You might not expect to encounter the "delegation" concept in a blog post about agile software development.  After all, agile is all about the "self governing team."  But in the real world, if you are in a company which is transitioning to agile, and you are the project manager of a newly created agile team, you may well need to consider how to create a situation around your team that allows self-governance to emerge without making you completely crazy.  In real life, your first few weeks with your agile team can seem like your worst nightmare.  This is not because there is something wrong with you.  This is completely predictable.  Stop blaming yourself. If your team is used to having you, as a project manager, take all the responsibility, and you suddenly stop telling people what to do, (along with not setting up their meetings, not taking their notes, and not getting them a projector every single time for every single meeting), you should not expect t...