change

“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.

Agile versus Waterfall is often presented as a difference in development methodology, but it is much more a clash of cultures. Large bureaucracies, government regulation and many other factors can create an environment that is hostile to many forms of innovation and in which Waterfall is actually the most cost-effective approach.

This presentation shares a set of stories, representing lessons learned from running an agile project in a waterfall-based telecom culture. What was done differently from the enterprise waterfall-based project management standard? What agile principles and specific practices were applied? What were tangible benefits to the business from the situation where one project team became “outlaws” of the corporate culture.