Pragmatic Agilist

You get a lot of woo-woo hand-waving when you ask a typical large-scale organizational change manager what they would put on the executive dashboard to show that their program is effective. "That's going to vary a lot from one company to the next," they may hedge.  Or "it depends" is a popular answer, also provided in long form: "it depends on what your executives want to see."  Right.  Like, executives who like Baroque Art want to see more Rubens.  That's helpful.  Not. A Rubens work from wikipedia.  You were expecting maybe an unclothed zaftig Venus? The dashboard is often "delayed," sometimes delayed until after the change management is over!  Why? One reason a change manager may have for hedging on the topic of the dashboard is that change is difficult .  A truthful dashboard is likely to show the standard change curve, reflecting the morale of the change-ees: http://rule-of-thumb.net/2008/09/26/the-change-curve/ Change...

From the first, I had been a pretty avid Android person, partly just because I wanted to be nonconformist.  But after starting out strong with the original Motorola "Droid," I fell prey to two Samsung Galaxy II phones in a row that had poor call quality.  (Yes, I sailed right from "shame on you" to "shame on me" in that little transaction).  I returned the first one FIVE times to AT&T before they decided it was a "lemon" and let me upgrade to the next phone up. From att.com! Imagine my horror when I discovered that the Samsung Galaxy Skyrocket II had the same problem.  I spent hours getting software upgrades in various AT&T stores across America, and after a replacement or two, I finally checked out the interweb and found numerous geek-oriented sites that documented something I would have loved to have known a while ago: Samsung phones are not known for call quality and some Galaxies II have a specific problem in which the speake...

One of the grim proving grounds for the would-be agile business analyst (henceforth "WBABA")  is the "traceability conversation."  Eventually, you will have to have one.  You may have seen one already.  If you haven't, you may want to half-avert your eyes as you read further.  It gets a little brutal.  But if you close them all the way, you can't read. From:  http://www.highestfive.com/mind/how-to-perform-a-successful-interrogation/ Dialogue: WBABA :   ...so in summary, we complete analysis on each story card, and then we support the developers as they build it that same iteration! Corporate Standards Guy:   but how do you do traceability in agile?  You have to have traceability.  It's broadly recognized as an important factor in building rigorous software systems. These software systems permeate our society and we must entrust them with lives of everyday people on a daily basis. [The last two sentences are an actu...

Many agilists do not deal well with corporate hierarchy.  "In the agile world," they say smugly, "we will all be equal."  Quick quiz:  although the venerable "pigs and chickens" metaphor is now sliding out of favor among the agile cool kids, which of the following are agile transformation coaches still very likely to do: Characterize the direct line managers of team members as "people to keep out of the room at all costs, and if they must be there, to be tolerated only if they maintain a respectful silence." Describe the entire group between CEO and the team doing the work as "middle managers--the people I wish didn't exist." Make cruel and dismissive comments about "command and control." Wear jeans to work every day, not just on Fridays, in violation of the corporate summer dress code. Yes, sadly, the correct answer is "all of the above," although item 4 is just a passive-aggressive manifestation of the...

Let's say you want to convert your company's software development processes to "agile."  Where to start, you wonder. If you're a software developer, you'll say, "it's about DEVELOPMENT!  Get out of my WAY!" and off you trundle to be agile, and if you knock over all of your business partners along the way, heaven help you .   Connoisseurs of my existing agile-related oeuvre (hi Mom!) may guess at this point that I'm about to do another impassioned defense of Agile Business Analysts as the Most Important People on the Team .  But no, not even our heroic Shoeshine Boy-cum-UnderDog analysts can empower an agile team to be fabulous on their own. If you're an executive, you may cannily notice that your development staff is already jumping around like hyper ferrets with their build pipelines, their sharpies and their card walls, and you might think all you need now is a "Scrum Master" to help keep things a little organized.  T...

One day you may need to communicate with an executive. Pro tip 1 :  executives do not have time for you to dim the lights and show them forty slides with charts composed of animated dancing leprechauns and flashing arrows that emerge from the void in a checkerboard pattern. Pro tip 2 :   Guys, and gals with deep voices, executives also don't need you to use your "Radio Announcer Voice." As a rule, what executives want is simple: one printed page. No matter what it is, it should be one page. And it should be printed, not emailed.  You should plan to hand it to the executive, and then you should be quiet when they read it and wait for their questions.  It's harder than it sounds. http://www.simpsonstrivia.com.ar/wallpapers/mr-burns-wallpaper.htm  So how do you do it?  Here are the steps: Write the deck that expresses your proposal in as many slides as it takes.  Use imaginative animation and blinking letters if you must. Remove your title s...

If you're reading this, you may be attempting a large scale organizational change of some kind.  And perhaps you are feeling overwhelmed at the huge amount of literature available in "the Google" about how to change a large organization . Please, just stop it right now!  You are setting yourself up for the classic organizational change mistake:  letting the "perfect" get in the way of " the good ."  Or even "the existent."  If you've even got a small idea that is a good one, just do it.  Stop pondering the big picture and try something.  Let's start with the concept of "culture change." http://www.bizcoachaustin.com/services/jump-start-your-business/ Ask anyone, and they'll tell you, "oh a culture is the hardest thing to change."  Then ask them what they've tried.  Sometimes the culture is ahead of you , and you don't need to send out individual missionaries to personally convert and baptize ne...