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"We Suck Less!" Is Not Enough

Presented by David Douglas & Robin Dymond on Aug 15, 2008 08:50 AM

Community
Agile
Topics
Adopting Agile
Tags
Failure ,
agile2008
Summary
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, David Douglas and Robin Dymond discuss about companies which try to adopt Agile, but don't go all the way, resulting in failure and rejection of it, and predictably having a negative impact on Agile's future.

Bio
David Douglas is a career consultant for Fortune 500 and mid-sized companies in a wide array of industries and co-founder of Innovel. Robin Dymond is VP of Innovel, and a leader in training for Scrum, Agile, and Lean methods.

About the conference
Agile 2008 is an exciting international industry conference that presents the latest techniques, technologies, attitudes and first-hand experience, from both a management and development perspective, for successful Agile software development.

Related Sponsor

VersionOne is recognized by Agile practitioners as the leader in Agile project management tools. Companies such as Adobe, BBC, CNN, Dow, HP, IBM, Sony and 3M have turned to VersionOne to help deliver greater value to their customers.

4 comments

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Thats true with everything in this field by Francois Ward Posted Aug 15, 2008 8:15 AM
Re: Thats true with everything in this field by Mike Funk Posted Aug 19, 2008 7:40 AM
Only large projects? by Rukshan Jayaratna Posted Aug 20, 2008 4:06 AM
Insights from presentation by Robin Dymond Posted Sep 3, 2008 11:11 PM
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    Thats true with everything in this field

    Aug 15, 2008 8:15 AM by Francois Ward

    The whole "take what we think is important, but don't go all the way" paradigm is omnipresent in the field, and is one of the major cause of project failures.

    Often, when new methodologies or technologies are introduced, there has been great in depth analysis of the potential pitfalls, and documentation on how to avoid them (often as part of the core methodology or tool or whatever). These are often ignored by teams as "not for us", "doesn't fit in our company", "people would never accept it", etc etc.

    So then all of the severe flaws of the methodology, tool, technology, API, whatever which were thought about in the planning stage, are left wide open, and the people blame the methodology. Its -always- like that.

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    Re: Thats true with everything in this field

    Aug 19, 2008 7:40 AM by Mike Funk

    Francois's experience mirrors my own. In the past 4 years, I've only seen Scrum implemented correctly twice. I suspect 90% of those companies using Scrum do so in name only.

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    Only large projects?

    Aug 20, 2008 4:06 AM by Rukshan Jayaratna

    I've been scanning around agile material. Most are very large projects. My company have turned out projects with 3-4 team members max, working for some times less than 2 months. Recently I've tested out a team where the team PM, was more "Agile Coach" role and the team consisted of a BA plus two developers. The result turned out good. No way of comparison, since from the start of the company we were into Agile.

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    Insights from presentation

    Sep 3, 2008 11:11 PM by Robin Dymond

    The challenge presented to executives and leaders in organizations is to recognize the fundamental organizational design issues that sustained Agile adoption requires. At the end of the presentation we work with the audience on an exercise to define what is "done" for an enterprise Agile adoption. Insightful discussion and ideas are presented, including from Steve Greene and members of the Salesforce R&D team.

    Innovel is a leading Scrum, Agile, and Lean training and consulting firm. Industry and academic contribution are core parts of our business. In addition to this presentation, Robin Dymond presented a new training simulation that has been made available at no charge to companies and consultants training businesses to use Agile methods.

    Regards, Robin Dymond, CST
    Managing Partner, Innovel
    Assistant Producer Learning and Education Stage Agile 2008

    Reply

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