Three Clarities in Agile Movement

Agile becomes the mainstream software management methodology because it becomes so pervasive now, even turns to be an Agile movement. However, Doing Agile is far away from being agile, and there is high failure rate to become real Agile, part of this is the success that companies and organizations engaged in complex-to-innovation operations initially enjoyed when employing agile systems. However, as agile became increasingly pervasive, it became increasingly viewed as an "improvement" on reductionist management, which has dominated management theory and practice for the last century. How to clarify Agile principles and lead agile transformation more effortlessly?

The real Agile dev organizations should follow and the focus on freedom from common sense business principles: Often the Agile projects or practices go wrong because  it is no longer something guided by aspirations and principles but a product that is packaged and sold. When businesses are trying to find new ways of delivering software has changed to they are trying to deliver software under whatever flavor of framework a particular consulting company is selling. Here are some symptoms of the “agile’ illness:1). The desire for a silver bullet.2). Excuse for staying in comfort zones, even if getting more harms not being felt.3). Being afraid of uncertainties and losing controls.
It is healthy while the "Agile movement" is centered on "address ignorance and call out stupidity": The very people who started this Agile journey in many ways have now contributed to where we stand today. The biggest threat is thinking these frameworks solve all of your problems and make the organization Agile, they don't. It's really hard work to discover what Agile is for you. The rapid growth of over commercialized "Agile movement" and the popularity of Scrum have been making more and more people do the wrong things by the name of Agile or Scrum. Before there are "enough people doing that" to improve the world, the new ignorance and stupidity decorated by Agile/Scrum will be overwhelming, and those who address ignorance and call out stupidity will be marginalized.
The fact is that the only way you can assess competence in agile is for a skilled practitioner to have cross-functional conversation and understanding. From example, HR departments don't like that: the expert is always "too busy" and they become irrelevant, so they feel threatened. They want an easy metric that an unskilled person can use to assess an applicant. There are more Agile practices without being real agile:1).Moving from one extreme (big upfront design) to another (no design at all)2). Productization of agile: Instead of adopting agile as mindset and way of working, there are a lot of folks out there who are selling agile as products or services.3). Implementing agile in IT departments without working on touch points in other departments (HR, finance, etc.)
Agile transformation is not an easy journey. The best way to fail is thinking that you will implement agile inside a business unit without taking into account the whole enterprise. Why? Because it’s about to integrate. Take any agile software development method and think about all the business unit and people who have to engage to create the product. It is a corporate management philosophy. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
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Published on March 14, 2016 22:47
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