I spend a considerable amount of time advising people on adopting Agile methods – and a large portion of that time is getting them to understand the difference between a methodology such as Scrum, and organisational agility. It is your agility (small “a”) that is important – how quickly and successfully you can adapt to change, how well you can predict change, and how effectively you can cause change. Scrum, XP, or any other Agile (large “a”) method or tool, is only going to help with a small part of your organisation.
We need to ensure that we are not just focused on project management or software engineering, but on the entire organisation. However, there is danger in attempting to change the world in one step. I also spend a lot of time ensuring that people understand the magnitude of the task they have ahead of them, and how difficult it will be, without curbing their enthusiasm too much. It is, after all, worth the effort.
Johanna Rothman understands this, and has written a superb series of posts discussing the difference between adoption of agile thinking at different levels within an organisation. Although a boots-n-all approach works best for a single development team, she suggests that managers take a more gradual approach to changing administrative structures and process across the organisation:
Moving to agile for the entire organization is a non-trivial problem. The zeroth step is the project. The first step is the project portfolio. Then comes the really hard work: the human systems are the next step. Once you’ve moved the human systems back to helping the employees, now you can attack the money systems. (One of my clients is trying to do the money systems first, and that’s not working. There may be some give-and-take here, with the money and human systems.)
Managers, it’s OK to dip your toe into agile for the management systems, as long as you take a coherent piece and commit to agile or lean for that piece. It’s not OK to dip your toe for a given project – commit to agile for a project, if that’s right for you. And, commit to learning about agile and lean management.
In essence, Rothman says over this short series of posts that doing Agile well requires a level of discipline that not all projects are prepared for (I have the personal “battle scars” to back her up on this one). Choose which projects are ready, and transition them fully; but don’t worry about transitioning all projects or the whole organisation all at once, think ‘gradual’ when it comes to that.
As enthusiastic as I am about agility, Agile, and change … I tend to agree with her. If you have not read any of her books, check out the Pragmatic Bookshelf site.
