Andy's Mind

With 2010 ending soon it is a good moment to think about the future of agile. First – lets define it: agile is a set of principles, methods and practices that emphasise short turnaround times, high flexibility (also as a way of dealing with risk through adaptation), focus on quality and teams. Agile has been around for a decade now and it is now widely known and accepted – long gone are days when barely anyone knew about it.

With agile now mainstream it is clearly loosing its initial momentum and freshnes. While many would object I think this is a sign of maturity. Agile as a phenomenon merely follows a natural path of methods/approaches from new to commonplace. With that its position changes. From a separate specialty driven by a few “gurus” and a crowd of active followers (and consultants) it is now becoming a part of every good manager’s methods&approaches portfolio. From something that few people specialized in agile will now be transitioning into something everyone must know to a degree appropriate for their seniority and specialty.

This is good news, because it means the agile movement has succeeded in changing the industry – even if it means that I can envision agile practices becoming part of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) in three to four years. This is the book despised by many agilists (most of whom probably didn’t even read it) yet agile’s inclusion there will be a sign of its success – and an end to an era.

In hope that in the near future there will be much less need for dogmatic “agile coaches” and much more for good pragmatic managers, who will be able to use and apply both agile and traditional project management methods – as well as manage the operational, financial and human part of their businesses/units/teams. Key here is to use methods, tools and tricks that are appropriate to get things done – as opposed to trying to squeeze every situation to fit a method one happens to know best. Dogmatism that I crticized in my last post doesn’t help here.

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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In July I decided to start using webinars to interact with the users of our Scrum tool – the Banana Scrum. I also started to use webinars to broadcast seminars of the Polish Scrum Group.

Obviously, I needed a webinar solution to do this. Choosing which one of the many webinar/web meeting platforms available to use turned out to be quite a process. I share it here to help others who may have similar needs.

My requirements were pretty simple (or so I thought):

• good for both demos (showing how to click around Banana Scrum) and presentations with traditional narrated slides (for the Scrum group),
• easy to use for both presenter and participants,
• recordings of good quality, preferably editable with standard tools, for subsequent posting on the pages,
• event management (registration form, sending people e-mails with calendar attachments, links etc.),
• cheap.

All in all I’ve looked at following platforms:
– Cisco’s WebEx,
– DimDim,
– Microsoft’s LiveMeeting,
– Cytrix’s GoToWebinar.com,
– Adobe Connect Pro.
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