I’m often asked by passionate agile champions how to help sell agile within their company.\u00a0 Selling Agile is all about change management.\u00a0 As with any change management you need to look to the mindset of the people that you wish to influence and find out what barriers exist and what prizes can be had for those that endorse the change.\u00a0 Each person on the team or from a management position is coming from their unique perspective.\u00a0 Typically, we see patterns of behavior that enable grouping of these perspectives.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll start with the easiest group:<\/p>\n
They have already drunk the kool-aid.\u00a0 They recognize that what has been going on in the past has not been working all that well and welcome the change.\u00a0 There is no need to continue to try to convince this group.\u00a0 Instead do what is necessary to keep them from getting frustrated and focus on harnessing their passion and leverage it into convincing others. This group is your ally.\u00a0 Keep up their passion and leverage it, but don\u2019t spend too much time preaching to the choir.<\/p>\n
This group doesn\u2019t need no stink\u2019n process.\u00a0 They have the mindset that if management and process would just get out of their way then they would be able to work wonders.\u00a0 Sometimes there\u2019s some truth to what they say.\u00a0 More often than not, however, the result of cowboys let loose is a chaotic train wreck.\u00a0<\/p>\n
How to approach this group depends on where your organization is coming from.\u00a0 If your starting point is perceived by the cowboys to be a stodgy bureaucratic process, then most likely the cowboys can be won over relatively easily by convincing them that agile development is a far lighter weight process and is designed to allow them to flourish.\u00a0 The danger here is that it is too easy for a cowboy to look into agile only to conclude with \u201cyippee yi yay\u2014I told you that all this documentation was crap.\u201d\u00a0 So, while it may be possible to get them to convert, the effort needs to be on maintaining their discipline and keeping their focus on value delivery.\u00a0 The key here is the focus on \u201cpotentially shippable product.\u201d\u00a0 If a cowboy mindset can become \u201ctest infected,\u201d then you have an incredibly powerful agile developer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now if your cowboys have been allowed to live like free range chickens, then your problem is quite different.\u00a0 The challenge is that the cowboys like having free reign, and will often see any process, even an agile process, as an unnecessary constraint and bureaucracy.\u00a0 If this is your environment and you want to win over the cowboys, keep things light and look for areas where everyone agrees some improvement could be made.\u00a0 Usually there is something from the agile toolkit that provides a good solution for that area, so emphasize that aspect and gain success to begin to win over some converts.\u00a0 A common issue with a cowboy dominated culture is quality.\u00a0 If that is the case for you, then look to introduce practices such as test driven development or just work on truly getting to \u201cdone\u201d so that you have a potentially shippable product at each iteration.<\/p>\n
This group just doesn\u2019t like change.\u00a0 The old way may not have been optimal when they started using it, but they\u2019ve been doing it long enough now that they think they know how to do it and every time they tried something it has failed (often because enough of them have sabotaged it to make it fail).\u00a0 This group is dangerous if they really are willing to sabotage the effort.\u00a0 They can be very difficult to win over.\u00a0 They see a big prize in keeping things the status quo, and\/or are threatened by any change.\u00a0 The first thing to do is to find out what is the prize that they are holding onto and what are their fears.\u00a0 If your curmudgeons are intractable with their position, you may need to look to move them off the team or to sideline them so that they are not causing problems for the team.\u00a0 Ultimately many of them will convert, but they will typically be the last to convert.<\/p>\n
This is the group that typically has the biggest mindset misalignment with agile development.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the corporate world is often driven by this mindset and as such many senior leaders get promoted based on the perception that they are able to bring control to chaotic environments.\u00a0 Software development has inherent uncertainty, much more uncertainty than even those within the industry care to acknowledge.\u00a0 Control freaks don\u2019t like uncertainty.\u00a0 Uncertainty is a problem.\u00a0 They don\u2019t like problems, they want solutions.\u00a0 Detailed plans give them the illusion of control.\u00a0 Ignoring the uncertainty is a convenient way for it to go away.\u00a0 Their mindset is that prior projects have been unsuccessful because they did not do enough up front planning.\u00a0 If only we had spent more time up front we would have learned everything.\u00a0 It makes a lot of sense, especially in a linear world of thinking.\u00a0 The problem is that it just doesn\u2019t work.\u00a0 There are some things which are just fundamentally unknowable until the solution is further evolved.\u00a0 Frederick Brooks called this the werewolf in his famous essay \u201cNo Silver Bullets.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 The irony in the situation is that agile development actually provides more control of the software project than one gets with a detailed upfront plan.\u00a0 The difficulty is convincing the control freak of that fact.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Often control freaks can be convinced to try things out, especially now that agile development is getting more mainstream.\u00a0 After all, there are a lot of things about agile they are likely to endorse.\u00a0 Agile development focuses on value and how to deliver value effectively.\u00a0 They will typically like the concept of user stories and planning associated with task breakdown.\u00a0 They will also get behind the focus on quality and the drive towards a potentially shippable product.\u00a0 It may be possible to convince some control freaks that agile development is actually more disciplined than where they have been.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some common problems with control freaks that start the transition to agile is their tendency to over-plan\u00a0and their unwillingness to allow the team to self organize.\u00a0 One common over-planning behavior is the desire to take the entire backlog and allocate it out to iterations all at the beginning of the project.\u00a0 This is can range from being a potentially harmless waste of effort to being quite dangerous if it also sets expectations that such a detailed plan will actually be followed.\u00a0 Control freaks must get satisfied that they are doing enough detailed planning.\u00a0 Try to keep them focused within the iteration and help them avoid their tendency to want to plan everything in detail.\u00a0 Get to the heart of what they are trying to control.\u00a0 Probably they feel they need a detailed plan so that they can give predictable answers when questioned.\u00a0 Help them learn that questions are best answered when there is sufficient knowledge to answer them, and that agile development will surface that knowledge.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the biggest problem with control freaks is that they can often get in the way of allowing the team to self organize.\u00a0 If the control freak is in a management position this can be particularly challenging.\u00a0 If you are in a position of leadership yourself, then you can sometimes minimize this issue by shielding the team from the control freak.\u00a0 It puts extra burden on you, but makes the team far more effective.\u00a0 If the control freak is inside the team then the team needs to work together to help them get over their concerns.\u00a0 If the team cannot band together to deal with this then it is unlikely that they are going to get much traction on the issue.<\/p>\n
For further reading, I recommend a book \u201cFearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas\u201d by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m often asked by passionate agile champions how to help sell agile within their company.\u00a0 Selling Agile is all about change management.\u00a0 As with any change management you need to look to the mindset of the people that you wish to influence and find out what barriers exist and what prizes can be had for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddlittleweb.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddlittleweb.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddlittleweb.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddlittleweb.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddlittleweb.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddlittleweb.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddlittleweb.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddlittleweb.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddlittleweb.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}