Agile adoption
Agile is about giving responsibility to the people, and self-organization is one of the way this is achieved. Agile is also about continuous improvement and adaptation. To follow this journey, the Scrum teams need to assess how they are doing and where they should improve. In this article, Ben Linders discusses Agile self-assessments and how they can support the continuous improvement process to an Agile mindset.
Even if the Scrum framework is simple and easy to describe, there are still many cases were organizations fail in adopting Scrum. One of the main reasons is that many companies see the transformation towards Agile as a simple change in the process and not the adoption of new values. In this article, Zuzi Šochová explains that you cannot just do Scrum, you have to be Scrum.
Organizations often start with Scrum after having heard about it, read about it, or after having read the Scrum Guides. While that is great, there are several unforeseen challenges they often face that prevent them from really benefiting from the advantages of Scrum. This presentation discusses seven unmentioned challenges of Scrum and uncovers possible solutions.
The Agnostic Agile Oath is a movement that aims at recognizing the importance of being agnostic with agility at any level. As it is stated on the web site: “one size does not fit all, one framework is not the answer, and the what’s and the how’s of what needs to be done, should be suited to customer context and to a wider strategic vision.”
This is about agile “anti-patterns”: “something that looks like a good idea, but which backfires badly when applied” (Coplien). The presenter has been around Agile development from before it was called Agile. In that time, he has seen teams fall into the trap of many of these anti-patterns, becoming stuck without ever realizing it.
“Agile has become overly decorated. Let’s scrape away those decorations for a minute, and get back to the center of Agile.” The Heart of Agile is a fresh look at Agile that strips away a lot of the cruft that has built up over recent years. Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve. Alistair Cockburn goes over the addition of kokoro onto the shu-ha-ri sequence, and its implications for agile.
Resistance to change is part of the human condition and overcoming this resistance is part of adopting Agile & Scrum and changing the way delivery teams work together. A large part of the prevailing certified methods are about tackling this problem in a variety of ways. How successful these methods are depends on many things and not least the starting conditions and senior leadership support. Without this kind of safety net creativity is called for and Tony Heap talks here about his experiences with a less head on approach to influencing things.
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