Story goes like this. Once a tribe was introduced to light bulb. Our engineers installed cables, switches and light bulb to community which did not know about electricity or lights in general. Most households were taught how to switch ON and OFF lights. They did not know how it works, but it made huge difference to their lives. Their day now stretched beyond after dark hours and they felt more empowered and safe in their houses than before.
But one day when switch was moved to ON position, light did not come up. This started several superstitious theories about this incident. They called witch-doctor to home to get rid of black powers which stopped light in their house but that did not make any difference.
On their next round engineer visited house and replaced blown up bulb. He also explained science behind it and how it operates. This helped them to understand that switch was just means to control electricity flowing to the light; it is electricity which was driving force behind the bulb. As anything in life things sometime breakdown and they need replacement too.
In Corporate world I have observed that several processes are followed like a ritual without understanding logic or reasoning behind it. Many managers/leaders do poor job in explaining Ethos (spirit) behind processes.
In my experience of delivering projects with Agile development methodologies, I have observed that at organisational level they implement methodology without understanding reasoning behind it. Various Agile rituals such as standups, user stories, retrospectives, iterative development are followed without really understanding their purpose.
In one organisation onsite team and offshore teams ran their own standups separately. Their concept of collaboration was couple of telephone calls between both teams in a week. In other place they carried out development in multiple iterations but they would release/ ship product quarterly. In most organisations project governance team did not like agile development because it was difficult to explain to senior stakeholders why a project is delivering to production frequently without following robust (i.e. lengthy) service introduction process.
Agile gurus also do not do good job at explaining reasoning behind agile. To be fair, they may not get opportunity to educate senior management. Agile implementation is seen as localised exercise within development teams. It is rarely considered as organisational cultural change.
Key success factor for project is management support. But Agile rarely gets appropriate management support. Agile is not just development methodology or project methodology, it is cultural change. In my opinion most organisation fail to grasp this cultural change and fail to capitalise on Agile.
If you have worked in corporate world, you may have observed that any cultural change is typically led by senior management or board and then trickle through the organisation. Whereas agile is rarely implemented in top-down fashion. Agile is implemented as bottom-up change which no wonder results into painful journey for everyone involved.
I will be publishing series of blogs addressing every aspect of agile with reasoning behind its principles. Hopefully if you are on AGILE journey, you will be able to get value out of them. Any feedback greatly appreciated.
Author is IT consultant with decade long practical experience of delivering projects using Agile and traditional project management methodologies. Vinayak also been responsible for introducing and strengthening agile development techniques in various organisations.
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