Andy's Mind

I have been leading a two day workshop a couple of months ago and it was an interesting experience in servant leadership that I can now share. The workshop was about the overall systems architecture at the company I was working with at the time. My mission there was transforming their IT department into an agile organization and the workshop took place three months after the change effort started.

The catch was that I was doing it as the company’s CIO – effectively being the boss of all the other people in the room. Given the culture that existed there before it meant there was a real risk they will stay silent and expect me to tell them what architecture I had in mind rather than discuss their ideas. Therefore I had to adopt a very different approach to leading it than when I’m acting as an external consultant/coach. The fact that I genuinely had no idea how to solve the problem at hand helped me do it – I had no architecture to push for.
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What I suspected for a long time will happen just did: PMI has announced its agile certificate. This is a significant development for many reasons.

First of all it officially confirms agile’s position amongst respected management methods – as part of the mainstream. I wrote about it at length recently, so I’ll just point out here that PMI’s move spells the end of the “agile revolution” in one sense. Just like the Linux revolution before it agile came with a promise of radically reshaping the workplace. It will in some places, but overall (and just like Linux) it will not completely eradicate its older alternatives, but rather become one of them – another respectable, mature tool for managing projects/teams.
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1. Dogmatism

Agile is about adaptive, creative approach to complex work yet amazingly average agilists are the most dogmatic people I know. If you read their blogs and follow their tweets you will soon see dogmas being proclaimed and anathemas being cast on heretics who don’t agree.

The irony is that those dogmas can be pretty obvious observations, just repackaged to look like great discoveries. A good example I’ve seen on Twitter recently: “If you haven’t met you are not a team”. Well, that’s pretty obvious that it is much harder for team cohesion to occur when people don’t meet – it has been known for years that colocated teams are more productive than dispersed teams. However, to say that such a team can’t be a team and can’t do anything meaningful is turning an insight into a dogma.
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Almost three years ago at the Agile Development Practices conference Mary Poppendieck took the stage and announced to the assembled agilists that Agile has become mainstream. It was met with applause.

This moment reflects very well the mood of those involved in the agile movement back then. Everyone was sure that agile approach and practices will now take the industry by storm and reshape the way we work on software projects. For some time it indeed looked like Scrum, XP and other less known practices and methodologies will replace the dreaded waterfall and the poor quality it consistently delivered in software. Alas, three years later it is clear that even though almost everyone now claims to be ‘agile’ not everything turned out so great. In fact, it turned out that implementing Agile in teams is very hard and in large companies with many teams even harder. There were many success stories – but an also a great number of (mostly untold) stories of agile failing to deliver its promises. Clearly, Agile was working as expected only in some places.
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