Agile Is Hard!!

!!Ron Lichty, principal, Ron Lichty Consulting

author, Managing the Unmanageable!www.RonLichty.com, www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net !

!!

Our Distinguished Panel •  Pollyanna Pixton

–  Principal, Accelinnova –  Author • Stand Back & Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility

•  The Agile Culture: Leading through Trust & Ownership

•  Brian Drummond –  Senior Agile Coach, LinkedIn –  Formerly: Yahoo!, Apple, Adobe, IBM, U.S. Government

•  Jason Kline –  Agile Coach, Salesforce –  Formerly held Engineering and Agile Leadership roles at

NAVTEQ, Nokia, and Good Technology

Ron Lichty,��� Managing Software People & Teams

SOFTWEST

* Addison Wesley published October 2012

*

Rules of Thumb / Nuggets of Wisdom*

* 300 in the book

Waterfall and Agile

Waterfall and Agile

Methodology  You  Use  

Methodology  You  Associate  with  Increase  Profits  

Agile   Blended  (Some  Waterfall  and  Some  Agile)   Lean   Waterfall  

Agile   73.9%   13.0%   9.8%   0.0%  

Blended  (Some  Waterfall  and  Some  Agile)   31.8%   46.2%   10.6%   6.1%  

Lean   14.3%   0.0%   42.9%   14.3%  

Waterfall   15.8%   50.0%   18.4%   13.2%  

Don't  Know   5.3%   42.1%   26.3%   5.3%  

Waterfall and Agile •  So if Waterfall is so unprofitable, …

– …if waterfall has all these wasteful practices

•  Then Agile must be easy?

Agile Seems Simple •  It’s just that thing developers do

Agile Seems Simple •  If we just follow a few practices…

–  planning, standups, demos, maybe retrospect

Agile Seems Simple •  It’s all about delivering iteratively…

– we’ve been doing that for years

Agile Seems Simple •  And then we wonder…

•  Why aren’t we getting the results we expected?

Agile Is Hard •  It’s not about the practices

•  It’s about the values •  It’s about the principles

Agile Is Hard

•  “Becoming agile is hard. It is harder than most other organizational change efforts I've witnessed or been part of [for reasons] including … the need to avoid turning Scrum into a list of best practices.”��� --Mike Cohn, xxx

Managers and Agile •  Supporting Agile Values

The Agile Manifesto

–  We value: •  Individuals and interactions over processes and tools •  Working software over comprehensive documentation •  Customer collaboration over contract negotiation •  Responding to change over following a plan

-- http://agilemanifesto.org/

Agile Is Hard

•  Doing large-scale projects is no easier in agile than in anything else –  SAFe is as complex as Kniberg’s model at Spotify!

Agile Is Hard

•  We don’t leverage development managers to help – We include them in training, sometimes – But we don’t train them for their roles

Agile Is Hard

•  We all need to change! –  Scrum masters can't act like project managers –  POs have to be available, have to order backlogs –  developers can’t just take direction –  managers/directors/VPs can't change targets mid-sprint

•  Everyone needs to understand WIIFM – what do I get out of making this change?

Agile Is Hard

•  We have to become learning organizations

Moving Beyond •  Revisit the values and the principles

regularly – Use them to guide how we each must change – Use them to guide whether our practices are true

•  Become a learning organization – Train your managers – Value learning for everyone

•  Evangelize your larger organization to embrace agile

•  Celebrate agile wins – if only less waste

Our Distinguished Panel •  Pollyanna Pixton

–  Principal, Accelinnova –  Author • Stand Back & Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility

•  The Agile Culture: Leading through Trust & Ownership

•  Brian Drummond –  Senior Agile Coach, LinkedIn –  Formerly: Yahoo!, Apple, Adobe, IBM, U.S. Government

•  Jason Kline –  Agile Coach, Salesforce –  Formerly held Engineering and Agile Leadership roles at

NAVTEQ, Nokia, and Good Technology

Ron Lichty Consulting •  Mentoring, coaching, interim and acting CTO / VP Eng roles:

–  http://ronlichty.com, Ron@RonLichty.com

•  The book: ���Managing the Unmanageable: ��� Rules, Tools & Insights for Managing Software People & Teams –  http://ManagingTheUnmanageable.net <-----tools, excerpts, more rules of thumb –  http:www.informit.com/agile <-----special prices: agile titles

•  The study: ���The Study of Product Team Performance –  http://ronlichty.blogspot.com

•  Training: The Agile Manager Managing Software People and Teams