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“Make my team more agile”
How not to go about it. And what to do instead.
Over the years, I have been involved in, or heard of, many similar requests. They usually come from senior managers, department heads or a CIO/CTO, wanting to jump on the agile bandwagon because of all the wonderful success stories the industry has shared. You know the ones, I’m sure.
Yes, I know — the ‘agile bandwagon’ has allegedly left town. No-one is apparently interested in agile transformations any more. And there’s a lot of truth in that.
I have a theory, though, about why the bandwagon left town. And it can be illustrated by comparing two (fictitious) conversations between a CIO I will call Michael and an Agile consultant (me). The fist conversation goes a little like this:
Michael: “Hi Chris. I’ve heard a lot about agile, and I would like you to implement [agile framework] across my entire department. How do you propose we do that?”
Me: “How much do you know about Agile?”
Michael: “Not a lot. Only what people tell me and i have done a little reading up on the subject. It all sounds great.”
Me: “Okay. We’ll start off by running a training program to get all the Scrum Masters and Product Owners certified in [framework], and courses for all the development teams…
