While agile has zealots, it is not a religion. Agile is a scientific method that converts economic chaos to profit.
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Product Owner
Enterprises often have lots of time-sensitive opportunities and insufficient skilled or creative people (called “developers” in this pattern) to do everything.
Problem: Stakeholder competition distracts creative people, interferes with profitable work and creates office politics …
To sustain rapid adaptation and innovation, we need good agile managers. But management talent is rare, and agile management talent even rarer.
Danger lurks when executives and managers don’t understand agile. You can tell when managers don’t understand agile: they don’t use it themselves. Agile methods, Scrum particularly, are perfect for managing creative teams, including management teams planning and executing strategy (see Strategy Scrum Teams). [suth2014]
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Strategy Scrum Teams
Management teams can use Strategy Scrum to manage themselves and more effectively finish important work. It creates greater resiliency, a more collaborative culture and deeper agile understanding, which helps their Scrum development teams succeed.
Are we agile? The highest performing innovators follow 6 progressive agile base patterns. To assess your agility, ask how well you follow those patterns. To stay agile, follow the agile base patterns indefinitely. Audit your business agility with this guide.
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Top-Down Agile Beats Bottom-Up
Leaders who publicly demonstrate agile methodologies and promote them top-down drive their organizations to sustain agile practices and succeed. But bottom-up agile transformations lack resiliency and generate cultural strife.
Agile methodologies are now widely recommended for managing software development, but most large companies require transformation from entrenched “waterfall development,” an intuitively appealing strategy that has created massive project disasters (see Why Software Fails). Traditionally, most large agile transformations have been pursued bottom-up. One approach starts with a single team, proves agile works, and then expands further and higher in the organization. Hopefully that agile team’s success inspires others to become agile. Another approach religiously converts all engineering teams to adopt a specific agile methodology, but leaves management teams and hierarchies, dependencies, promotion policies, job titles, roles, recruiting and budgeting in their previous form. The developers adopt agile, but the managers don’t.
Using an agile methodology for project management can help CEOs, organizations, managers, teams and individuals rapidly adapt to change, beat slower competitors and win profitable markets. Agile methodologies were created to prevent the frequent and expensive manufacturing and development failures that arose in “waterfall” or “ad hoc” projects.
Most people tackle large projects using an intuitively obvious approach called “the waterfall method”: plan a sequence of activities upfront (for example: design, prototype, build, test, deploy), then focus on one type of activity after another until they have completed the whole thing. Only in the end do they have something of value. From software development to car manufacturing, the modular sequencing in waterfall has proven extremely risky, resulting in multi-million dollar project cancellations and corporate bankruptcies. The problem arises from the enormous costs that precede real-world testing. There’s a lot of risk riding on the final stage.
Dan Greening and Jeff Sutherland will discuss Agile Leadership Patterns: The Agile Way of Doing at the Agile 2015 Conference, August 3–6, 2015. Join us and learn to answer the questions, “Am I agile?”, “Is my organization agile?” and “Are my leaders agile?” You only need to know five patterns.
If you want to get an awesome job with the least effort, jazz up your job search with agile self-management (Tweet). Agile methods will help you rapidly discover which of your skills match employer’s true needs, market yourself for better results, target “channels” that have the best opportunities, hone in how much to ask for, and land a great job.
Agile job seekers rely on six fundamental agile patterns to fuel a successful search. In this installment, we’ll focus on the Responsibility pattern. To “accepting responsibility,” in this case, means taking the attitude that everything that happens in your job search, good and bad, is something you caused—you own it.
Agile posits this trade off: that creative projects, such as software development, have such huge market, technical and budget uncertainty, that we should pay the high expense of repeated regression testing, packaging, deployment, and rework, to enable us to test our market and technical theories early and often, adapting our approach as we learn more.
Here is my elevator description of Scrum: it is rhythmic experimentation to improve production.
You don’t need agile/Scrum methods if you are certain of market, process and technical perfection or near-perfection. We have nothing to learn with such certainty, so experimentation is useless.
However, the billions of dollars wasted in failed software projects (see IEEE Spectrum 2005, “Why Software Projects Fail”) at abject failure rates exceeding 50% indicate that confident waterfall engineers are dangerously arrogant. We have much to learn about making more successful software projects. It is true that there are charlatans and religious zealots in the agile crowd, and I apologize for them, but there is growing evidence that agile practices are highly correlated with successful, low-cost projects, and enormously successful startups.