Company Culture as the Key Agile Milestone

What is Agile Culture ?

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Technical Director at CERTICON: http://www.certicon.cz

Co-founder of Agile Consortium at Czech Republic: http://agilnikonsorcium.cz

Agile blog: http://soch.cz/blog

Zuzana Šochová[email protected], [email protected]

http://www.certicon.cz/

http://agilnikonsorcium.cz/

http://soch.cz/blog

http://soch.cz/blog

Prague is where I live…

Historical city…

CERTICON is where I work…

by IT Corex:

• an IT project is more likely to be unsuccessful than successful

• about 1 out of 5 IT projects is likely to bring full satisfaction

• the larger the project the more likely the failure

1st step: change practices, skills, processes…

Try Agile ;)

SW development projects are failing

How difficult is to introduce given practice?

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How useful are the following practices?

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What was the most challenging during the agile adoption?

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Team Communication and Cooperation

Customer Communication and Involvement

Team Responsibility

Change Resistance

Management Support and

Understanding

• Hire a good full time coach

• Involve both design and testing

• Co-locate as much as possible

• Adjust the length of sprints for every project

• More customer focus

• Involve more business stakeholders

• Work more on responsibility, auto-organization

• Be aware of the change, it’s hard

What would you do differently?

• Agile cannot be implemented top-down only nor bottom-up only. Agile needs to be a grass roots effort that has executive level sponsorship.

• Don't cheat and never ever let a sprint go past its time.

• View coach and customer as KEY roles and ensure the right people are in these roles.

• Don't sell Scrum as the dogma.

• Make sure everyone involved in an agile effort understands the Agile Manifesto's Values and Principles

• Forget about "scrum tools". Use a real physical whiteboard and super-sticky post-its.

• Don’t forget the communication is everything.

• Attend Agile conferences.

What would you recommend ?

No common practice to use…

© ajpscs

AGILE means: Culture of Trust, Communication and Support

© http://gustavus.edu

© http://shannonstanley.files.wordpress.com

© http://www.bbc.co.uk

Collaborative Agile Culture– Quality

– Flexibility

– Be smart

– Sharing

– Self-Reliance

– Responsible

– Sustainable

– Successful

Company Culture as the Key Agile Milestone

© http://nextup.files.wordpress.com

Feels like chaos from the top…

© http://www.stevey.com

…but perfectly working in fact

© http://www.nzhistory.net.nz

© http://discussions.mnhs.org

© http://4.bp.blogspot.com

Starting agile…

Understand where you

are

© http://www.searchenginepeople.com

Starting agile…

Understand where you want to go

http://crfranke.wordpress.com

• Create a Sense of Urgency

• Pull Together the Guiding Team

• Develop the Change Vision and Strategy

• Communicate for Understanding and Buy-in

• Empower Others to Act

• Produce Short-Term Wins

• Don’t Let Up

• Make it Stick

Kotter’s 8 steps of successful change

© http://www.ouricebergismelting.com/

Different Environments…

Agile needs culture…Any method to be adopted must be essentially compatible with the culture.

If the culture doesn't support or embrace Agile, it will never work as a process.

Agile changes culture…At the same time certain cultures will be very difficult to change – i.e. heavy, authoritarian, top-down cultures. Maybe not impossible, but it could be close.

• Do believe in agile company culture

• Be able to embrace a change and overcome resistance

• Believe in people

• Have willingness to take risks

• Have DESIRE for Agile methods

Adoption Manifesto

Zuzana Šochová[email protected]

http://soch.cz/blog

http://www.certicon.cz

http://agilnikonsorcium.cz

Thank you for your attention

mailto:[email protected]




http://soch.cz/blog








Company Culture as the Key Agile Milestone

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