When the Wolves try to speak Sheep

My "agile" adventure started back in 1999 when I first read Kent Beck's "eXtreme Programming explained - embrace change". Those were the glory days of RUP and CMM ... process, process, process. Kent's story was - like Tom Demarco's "Peopleware" classic - about people, people, people and the craftmanship of software engineering.
But making the move from process-focus to people-focus in order to achieve hyper productivity in software development is a fundamental paradigm shift which is in our industry, not the natural next thing. When hitting the radar, the process and Command&Control guys laughed ... a couple of years later, they showed wrong.

Over the past 10 years, the agile wave hit the shores of many businesses and service companies (first in the US, later on in Europe and the rest of the world), and many organizations adapted to the agile slang. The wolves learned to speak Sheep, but they're still wolves. They preach "self-organizing-teams", but continue to micro manage and fill books with rules, roles and responsibilities. They preach "refine your plan as you go", but still expect detailed do-or-die gantt-charts with quality/scope/means/time all fixed and carved in stone. They preach no-big-design-up-front, but expect massive architectural diagrams in iteration 0. They preach trust, empowerment and engagement but manage by fear.

They speak the language but didn't make the paradigm shift, and I doubt that they will ever do as it's about embracing change and uncertainty, something most of us fear.

Nothing against wolves, as long as they speak Wolf.

"Agile" certification

Well, I guess it's the normal thing to happen, when things get mainstream, the temptation for people to "milk the cow until it drops" is stronger than the principles they used to defend. When I see what is happening around the "certification tracks" that are developed around Scrum, I must say I get mixed feelings about it.
More or less 10 years ago, when Scrum went public next to Crystal Clear, ASD, DSDM all in the shadow of the extreme XP, to me it was one of the more pragmatic flavours of the agile movement that was taking off. In contradiction to the black-and-white take-it-our-leave-it gospels of XP, it was bringing a clear message with the focus on the project management aspects of running a software development project. When looking at what is happening today, XP practices like TDD, pair programming, refactoring, continual integration, ... have become a commodity to modern software teams that take their job serious. The "extreme" aspects have disappeared (although there will always people who love to go for religious wars). I have the impression that the Scrum guys just go the opposite way. They try to score by shocking the people they should try to convince. You can discuss about style, and when looking at the effect XP had on the software engineering community, why wouldn't is work once again for the project management community?
It brings me back to the point I want to raise here. Is commerciallizing these agile ideas embedded in methodologies like Scrum the best way to bring the intended change. From what I hear from peers in my network, they are not really happy about it. Although we do not deny that Mike and Ken earn some return on investment on what they brought to the SE community. Still many people get the feeling, that money has become a bigger driver than the principles of the Agile manifesto.
What was fundamentally different between the agilists and the previous generation of methodologists is the fact that although these gurus all came with their personal flavour of implementation, they all subscribed the same basic priciples. But do the current practices of expensive certification tracks match with the open-source philosophy that turned the agile movement into a success? Eventually, what will be the difference between the more rigid methodology tracks like RUP & PMI which live on commercialization versus the agile practices and Scrum.
I do see the advantage of this commercialization as it will help agile practices entering into the more concervative type of software organizations, as to them something only has street credibility when expensive training and certification programs are required. But will it change them into agile organizations ... I'm pretty sceptic about it. Going agile is a paradigm shift, it's not something you do by following a training or passing an exam. It's something between the ears of people and no certificate will help making that switch ... it only helps upgrading your CV.

Who am I to blow against the wind

In a recent discussion on the implementation of agile techniques, I ran into the aspect of "courage" - one of the cornerstones promoted by the eXtreme Programming evangelists. In most of the organizations I rolled out agile techniques so far, there was always some flavour of "courage" required to get things done. But I never really saw it as an explicit requirement. People needed to be convinced of Test First principles, refactoring versus big-design-up-front or pair-programming, but I never had to "stand up and fight" ... eventually these things "sell" themselves if you're willing to muddy your boots. But in a recent implementation, the need for "courage" became key. The tention fields that determined the projectcontext were so strong - we would typically call it a "political" heavy loaded project - that the "common sense" aspects typical for the agile toolbox came to a halt.
Convincing the project team to have the guts to deal with these tention fields instead of going for work arounds was a tough thing to do. Getting people out of their trenches and make them couragous enough to give up the "who am I to blow against the wind" mind-set ... as far as I know, there's no open source toolset yet that can help us on this.

Agile banana box

Well, in July we 're moving to our new house. To avoid packing rush-hours, from time to time we already fill boxes with things we don't use regularly. Our neighbour works in a supermarket providing us with piles of empty banana boxes which have the right size and strength to avoid overload.

Last week Martine started with emptying our "library". Most of the books can be taken off-line for a few months, no problem. But my books on change management, methodology and software engineering ... that's my territory. So we agreed that I would take care of boxing these in.

Filling the boxes is not really a problem, piles of interesting books, but nothing I can't do without the next couple of months. From time to time I put a book aside "this one I have to keep at hand" ... after half an hour, the pile of books "I have to keep at hand" was enough to fill a box. That's good, this proves I've invested in the right books - sometimes Martine questions my "sponsoring" of Amazon.com;-)

Although it was not the intention, the vast majority of books "to keep at hand" are related to agile techniques. An Agile banana box. The idea of "just enough" methodologies filling up a banana box ... a strange thought isn't it. Is this a sign that these methodologies aren't that documentation averse after all. Or is it a sign of acceptance. Is our "industry" finally buying into getting things done.

Navi-System syndrome

The first time I had a car navigation system I was totally excited. It takes you where you've never been before.

Fact 1: It's amazing to see how people tend to follow the instructions given by a machine. Is it the woman's gentle voice that makes the driver obey the guidance instructions - for the women in the audience, male voices are also availabe for guidance. Is it the colourfull map display or the animated arrow icons that provide the necessary "street credibility" and make you follow the indicated route? Or is it simply becouse you don't know your way around?

Fact 2: When you travel in an area new to you, the quality of the calculated route is difficult to judge. But when traveling in an area you know fairly well, you frequently wonder what logic is behind the routing mechanism. Why is this device seldomly calculating the route you would take blindfolded? The system never tends to choose the natural trail choosen by people who commute every day.

Adding Fact 1 and 2 together, cummulated with the increasing congestion of our roads, results in the estonishing conclusion that these devices always get you where you want to go, but you're rarely the first to arrive.

You'll get where you want to go, but when will you arrive?
What has this to do with a learning organization or even with Quality Management?

Many companies build "navigation systems" for their organization. They provide nice process descriptions, policies, procedures, work instructions, guidelines, piles of document templates... all documented and accessible via sophisticated intranets and controlled by state of the art configuration management tools. Quality Management Systems (ISO 9000 series, CMMi, Six Sigma...), with renowned certification programs, stimulate this to increase the capability maturity of your organization

So when you start "driving" around in a new organization, the guidance is only a few mouse clicks or phone calls away. You'll get where you want to go, but again, when will you arrive?

Refactoring Human Resources:
In these well structured and documented organizations, people tend to switch to automatic pilot and follow the guidlines without questioning. I've seen it happening multiple times, the creativity and agility needed for survival in a CMMi level 1 organization, tends to crumble when this organization climbs the ladder of capability maturity. Off course these organizations grow more mature, but what about the agility and creativity of the average worker in these organizations.
As survival is less of an issue in these mature organizations, this agility and creativity could be used for other means. And that's where most organizations tend to fail: refactoring their human resources.

Although I never worked for a CMMi level 5 company yet (lucky me ;-), but I've seen a few acting in the mean time. I've been everywhere between level 1 and 3 in the past years. People stop thinking and lose their imagination, creativity and agility if they are not lead by managers who are aware of these risks and know how to cope with it.
Having process descriptions, procedure for every single task and a job description for every memeber of your staff is fine, but it is not stimulating people to think out-of-the-box and look at things from a "non-documented" perspective. Worse, in some of these organizations, thinking out of the box became a sin once the "certification" is accomplished.

In navigating through an economical climate that changes continuously with an ever increasing speed and frequency, "getting there" is no longer the main requirement. Changing the focus of managment from a purely "operational" perspective to a "change" perspective is the main challenge now. The average manager is not ready for this.

Silver Bullet Methodologies

I started working as a software developer in a C, C++ environment back in 1991. At the end of 1998 I made a career move towards the world of Quality Management in software engineering environments. At that time the Agile methodologies went public with XP at its frontline.

I remember Quality Week Europe 1999 where the first signs of this Agile movement appeared. At that time the subject of the day was all about CMM. XP was mainly seen as "extreme" and "not realistic", a brainfart that would soon be gone.

One year later at that same conference there were multiple sessions on XP and although there were still a lot of people sceptic about it, at least some of the XP concepts were accepted as "might bring added-value".

As the maturity of our industry is "rather" low, Quality management is almost automatically linked to "Change". The Agile movement, and Kent Beck's "Embrace Change" theme in particular, has been shaking the tree for the last 10 years.

As the Agile methodologies are rather shocking for the traditional/conservative European ICT community, they form an interesting playground when studying "Change". I've been reading most of the books that are published so far on the Agile methodologies, XP, ASD, SCRUM and their related practices, with as main points of interest "how is change introduced?" and "How to cope with the resistance to change?”

I do not believe in religious advocacy, in my opinion process fundamentalists - whether they are iterative or waterfall, process oriented or Agile driven - risk of being blinded by their faith. And although I feel great sympathy with the Agile movement, there are no silver bullets, a team needs the "processes" - sorry for the ugly word - that suits it fine, neither more nor less. I guess that's what the scrum guys mean with "self organizing".