Here is a draft handout from my presentation at “Agile NYC”, Instilling Agile Values for Creativity, Self-Improvement and Organizational Change – A Manager’s Perspective.
http://judykat.com/ken-judy/wp-content/uploads/public/papers/agile-values-outline.pdf
I have a week to prepare for this month’s APLN-NY which now goes by the zazzy name “Agile New York City”.
Last month, I was the last minute replacement for the planned speaker until the planned venue fell through. So this month, I am the scheduled speaker. This lends an air of improvisation to the event.
Right now, I am a year and a half into my current job and locked in the kind of agile adoption I’ve only presented with hindsight. Right now, I am about the day to day: acknowledging incremental progress, working through setbacks and full of my own limitations. I don’t know the ending. What I feel is an urgency to do better and be better.
So, I worked out the topic over some e-mail exchanges with Jochen Krebs. In the absence of a story to tell, it’s time to do a little a personal retrospection.
Instilling Agile Values for Creativity, Self-Improvement and Organizational Change – A Manager’s Perspective
The scale and speed of an agile adoption are external measures that don’t speak to the founding values of the practice. Collective ownership, continuous improvement and high trust are hard won, take time and discipline but lead to craftsmanship and joy. They are enabling conditions for innovation and beneficial change.
I will retrospect on my contributions both positive and negative towards cultivating these values in two teams. The first was a practice that matured over four years, led to a new mission for the team and direct collaboration with the founder and CEO. The second, is a new team finding its way at the end of its first year.
What will I do more off? What will I do less of? What impediments got in the way?
I am ambivalent about the Scrum community’s focus on process and tools.
Yes, it is this effort that has driven adoption and created an economy for us practitioners. But adoption is yesterday’s challenge. We’re kind of winning that one.
We need to place less emphasis on getting new organizations to try Scrum to more on getting existing teams practice Scrum better.
How many of us many, many Scrum adopters strive towards the potential of the practice?
Not just exceptional productivity – ambitious enough as that is — but exceptional productivity to a genuinely productive end.
Life is full of compromise but if that is not the aspiration — to fill our careers with as much of these achievements as possible — then why bother?
Why spend money on training and tools to deliver more waste on short, iterative cycles?
Why extract more lines of code that no one will test or use but only spend money to maintain?
Why use the Scrum process to perpetuate the alienation of the knowledge worker from their work?
Mastery means taking responsibility for ourselves and our peers. Grasping our practice is the sum of our intentions and actions in the service of something.
So here’s my plea to shift the conversation back to it’s roots.
“Agile” is about the material and human good we create when we respect our co-workers tell truth to our employers, strive to improve, and care for the people affected by the software we help build.
We use a tool or process to the degree it furthers that end and no farther.
Here are agile software development mistakes that kick my ass whenever I let them:
Supplement to a doomed Agile 2009 proposal.
Learning Outcomes