AW1 Agile Development Concurrent Session 11/12/2014 11:30 AM

"Can We Do Agile? Barriers to Agile Adoption"

Presented by:

Steve Adolph Blue Agility

Brought to you by:

340 Corporate Way, Suite 300, Orange Park, FL 32073 888-268-8770 ∙ 904-278-0524 ∙ sqeinfo@sqe.com ∙ www.sqe.com

As an agile coach with Blue Agility, and co-founder of e-learning publisher Development Knowledge, Steve Adolph pursues his passion for helping organizations get the job done. Steve has been creating and managing software development projects long enough to remember FORTRAN and PDP-11s. His professional career includes many exciting and critical projects—designing call processing software for digital telephone exchanges, design and development of leading edge network management systems, railway signaling, and telecom billing. Steve has diverse experience in job roles ranging from developer to chief engineer to CTO and coauthored the popular book, Patterns for Effective Use Cases.

Can We Do Agile? Barriers to Agile Adoption

Steve Adolph

sadolph@blue-agility.com

• Quickly form teams of roughly 4 to 5 individuals. • Agree on a facilitator for your team (total time 15

minutes) • In your teams:

– Step 1: Take 5 minutes to write on a post-it note write the reasons why a project can or cannot be agile.

– Step 2: As a team, construct an affinity map of your enablers and impediments.

– Step 3: be prepared to present your findings enablers and impediments to a project Take 5 minutes to discuss the question: “Can all projects be agile”

– Step 4: Summarize your findings

Can Any Project Be Agile?

The Agile Cinderella Project A textbook fairytale

This is your project

We can’t do agile because we don’t look like Cinderella

Cargo Cult Agile

We did all the practices and it didn’t work for us.

These Are Symptoms of Defining Agility in Terms of Specific Practices

The agile conversations often seems to degenerate to arguments over specific practices and which practice is and which practice is not agile.

Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools?

Embrace Change!

Great Mantra…but what does it really take to embrace change? What does it really take to be agile?

Fast Decision Cycles

Colonel John “40 Second” Boyd

Agility: Execute your OODA loop faster than your adversaries - John Boyd

Observe-Orient-Decide-Act

Observe Decide Act

Action (Test)

Decision (Hypothesis)

Observations

Unfolding Circumstances

Outside Information

Orient

Cultural Traditions

Genetic Heritage

New Information Previous

Experience

Analyses & Synthesis

Dr. Chet Richards, Boyd Colleague and Researcher

“I am not saying that the specific tactics of maneuver warfare – or any other form of warfare – apply to business. However, I am claiming that Boyd’s underlying strategy – the use of time as a shaping and exploiting mechanism and the emphasis on a culture/organizational climate that makes this possible – apply equally well to both”

Agility

Create value by learning faster than the rate of change

“We need to deliver software so fast our customers don’t have time to change their minds” Mary Poppendieck

What Impedes Agility?

Observe Decide Act

Action (Test)

Decision (Hypothesis)

Observations

Unfolding Circumstances

Outside Information

Orient

Cultural Traditions

Genetic Heritage

New Information Previous

Experience

Analyses & Synthesis

“Believing is Seeing”

Different Beliefs – Perspective Mismatch

Impediment to Fast feedback more than silos and distribution

Reconciling Perspectives

But if communications is good, is more better?

Relationship Between Performance and Communications Frequency (Patrashkova-Volzdoska, et al., 2003, p. 266) © 2003 IEEE

Tension in the process

Socio Technical Systems

“an organization’s objectives are best met not by the optimization of the technical system and the adaptation of the social system to it, but by the joint optimization of the technical and social aspects, thus exploiting the adaptability and innovativeness of people in achieving goals instead of over determining the manner in which these goals should be achieved” – Albert Cherns,

Scrum as a Socio-technical System

• The Social Roles Individuals Must Play in Agile – Supporting – mentor, I’ve got your back – Sheltering – “holding” the workspace, the heat

shield – Alerting (Boundary Spanner) – I’ll keep watch – Drum Beating – we need to decide…now

Enabling Fast Decision Cycles

Case Study: Translink

• Quickly rejoin your original team and take 5 minutes to discuss if this changes you perspective on that traits of a project that can or cannot be agile.

Can Any Project Be Agile (redux)?

• Even in the agile world people really do trump process.

• Software development is a socio-technical system. • We cannot optimize the technical system and

expect the social system to simply emerge. • The configurator adds to an agile assessment the

social factors that trump the technical factors

Summary

Steve Adolph

sadolph@blue-agility.com

Can We Do Agile? Barriers to Agile Adoption