Well, this is quite the statement… I know more than a few\u00a0software companies which state they are (almost) completely Agile, though in fact, they aren’t.\u00a0They are, in fact, FrAgile (yep.. fragile, like a thin sheet of glass<\/em>) as coined (and mentioned\u00a0in this presentation<\/a>)\u00a0by Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of the scrum methodology.<\/p>\n Many companies’ executives will tell you they have transformed their company to an agile one, abiding to all the “rules”\u00a0depicted by the agile\u00a0manifesto<\/a>.\u00a0They use scrum\u00a0for their application development, and they still have issues delivering good quality software on time,\u00a0most of the\u00a0time.<\/p>\n I used to ask myself why this is the case, and honestly… I still don’t exactly know why it is.\u00a0What I do know is, all of these companies aren’t sufficiently agile at the different levels in the organisation hierarchy. I’ve spoken to peer\u00a0software engineers at those companies, and they all say more-or-less the same thing. The development-team is really agile, but higher in the hierarchy they aren’t. Some of them are micro-managing, others are really directive in what the developers should build and how they should build it, others don’t accept a no-can-do from the development teams, and so on…\u00a0It might be I’m mistaken, but\u00a0in my possibly-not-so-humble opinion these are all killers of agile development.<\/p>\n An organisation can only be truly\u00a0agile when the entire<\/span> organisation wants<\/span> it to be!<\/strong><\/p>\n This doesn’t mean all departments should be using scrum per se (though it might help, and you’ll be surprised how well it can work…<\/em>).\u00a0I’m also not suggesting it is even possible for every single organisation to be agile in all departments. The important thing here is the\u00a0will\u00a0to be agile<\/strong>.\u00a0If everyone wants<\/span> to adopt an agile mindset, everyone will\u00a0understand<\/span>\u00a0what “sacrifices” have to be made, and what possibilities and goodness they will get<\/span> in return.<\/p>\n If there are, for instance, management departments which prefer to be stoic and unwilling to adopt the apropriate\u00a0mindset, and rather stay top-down\u00a0focused, even\u00a0while the underlying development department works their ass of to be the very best agile development department ever, this will still result in a poor performance.\u00a0Quite possibly they will have nothing to show for when a deliverable is needed.<\/p>\n I’m convinced there is a way to get from frAgile to Agile, though this quite possibly means there needs to be a mindshift in the entire organisation. When you say you are agile and are following the agile-manifesto, you really need to do so too<\/strong>.\u00a0I could write a lot of text here, but the aforementioned presentation<\/a>\u00a0has more than enough information to get you started. So I invite you to look at the slides and if moving imagery is more of your liking here is a youtube video about scrum@scale<\/strong> by Jeff Sutherland in which the subject is touched \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\nWhen agile goes out-of-the-window<\/h2>\n
How to get from frAgile to Agile<\/h2>\n