“Can we do agile?” is a question often asked by individuals enviously looking at the impressive results reported by other organizations that adopted agile practices. What they are usually concerned about are the commonly perceived barriers to agile adoption: large scale, legacy architecture and tools; and demanding governance and compliance practices. Yet, despite these perceived barriers, many organizations with these challenges do agile. Others wonder why, after all their training and shiny new tools, they can’t do agile. What they’re not seeing are the real barriers to agile adoption—the social barriers that impede fast decision cycles. Steve Adolph introduces a fast decision cycle model, explains why social factors are the dominant determinant of agile success, and provides a configuration guide to help participants identify and evaluate these social impediments. Using a case study of a “high ceremony” organization, you and Steve work together to find ways to resolve impediments to doing agile.
1. AW1
Agile Development Concurrent Session
11/12/2014 11:30 AM
"Can We Do Agile?
Barriers to Agile Adoption"
Presented by:
Steve Adolph
Blue Agility
Brought to you by:
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2. As an agile coach with Blue Agility, and co-founder of e-learning
publisher Development Knowledge, Steve Adolph pursues his
passion for helping organizations get the job done. Steve has been
creating and managing software development projects long enough
to remember FORTRAN and PDP-11s. His professional career
includes many exciting and critical projects—designing call
processing software for digital telephone exchanges, design and
development of leading edge network management systems, railway
signaling, and telecom billing. Steve has diverse experience in job
roles ranging from developer to chief engineer to CTO and
coauthored the popular book, Patterns for Effective Use Cases.
5. • Quickly form teams of roughly 4 to 5 individuals.
• Agree on a facilitator for your team (total time 15
minutes)
• In your teams:
– Step 1: Take 5 minutes to write on a post-it note write the reasons
why a project can or cannot be agile.
– Step 2: As a team, construct an affinity map of your enablers and
impediments.
– Step 3: be prepared to present your findings enablers and
impediments to a project Take 5 minutes to discuss the question:
“Can all projects be agile”
– Step 4: Summarize your findings
Can Any Project Be Agile?
10. The agile conversations
often seems to
degenerate to
arguments over specific
practices and which
practice is and which
practice is not agile.
Individuals and Interactions over
Processes and Tools?
15. Dr. Chet Richards, Boyd Colleague
and Researcher
“I am not saying that the specific
tactics of maneuver warfare – or
any other form of warfare – apply
to business. However, I am
claiming that Boyd’s underlying
strategy – the use of time as a
shaping and exploiting mechanism
and the emphasis on a
culture/organizational climate that
makes this possible – apply equally
well to both”
16. Agility
Create value by learning faster than the
rate of change
“We need to deliver software so fast our customers don’t have time to change
their minds” Mary Poppendieck
17. What Impedes Agility?
Observe Decide Act
Action
(Test)
Decision
(Hypothesis)
Observations
Unfolding
Circumstances
Outside
Information
Orient
Cultural
Traditions
Genetic
Heritage
New
Information Previous
Experience
Analyses &
Synthesis
“Believing is Seeing”
18. Different Beliefs – Perspective
Mismatch
Impediment to
Fast feedback more than
silos and distribution
22. Socio Technical Systems
“an organization’s objectives
are best met not by the
optimization of the technical
system and the adaptation of
the social system to it, but by
the joint optimization of the
technical and social aspects,
thus exploiting the
adaptability and
innovativeness of people in
achieving goals instead of over
determining the manner in
which these goals should be
achieved”
– Albert Cherns,
24. • The Social Roles Individuals Must Play in Agile
– Supporting – mentor, I’ve got your back
– Sheltering – “holding” the workspace, the heat
shield
– Alerting (Boundary Spanner) – I’ll keep watch
– Drum Beating – we need to decide…now
Enabling Fast Decision Cycles
27. • Quickly rejoin your original team and take 5
minutes to discuss if this changes you
perspective on that traits of a project that can
or cannot be agile.
Can Any Project Be Agile (redux)?
28. • Even in the agile world people really do trump
process.
• Software development is a socio-technical system.
• We cannot optimize the technical system and
expect the social system to simply emerge.
• The configurator adds to an agile assessment the
social factors that trump the technical factors
Summary
