Presentation: Dealing With the Organizational Challenges of Agile Adoption

In this presentation filmed during QCon London 2007, Joseph Pelrine talks about the challenges faced by organizations trying to adopt Agile methods. There are times when organizations want to become agile and they do not succeed. Joseph gives 4 reasons for that:

1. Not understanding what Scrum's Inspect and Adapt means. It should be: Apply, then Inspect and Adapt. Before inspecting one should apply a process to get data first in order to have something to inspect. Inspecting an agile book is not agile.
2. Fear of change, consequences or results. Dealing with reality can be hard.
3. Scrum, XP, and other methods are just tools. They bring results if done correctly in the right circumstances, otherwise they fail.
4. Communicational problems and conflicts between organization's members.

Joseph spends a great deal on conflicts, the necessity to understand the conflicts inside the organization and trying to buffer the different zones in order to mitigate the conflicts. Developers and managers think differently, being one source of conflicts. There are many other possible sources of conflicts because the human society is complex, not abiding by rigorous laws.

The entire presentation is 58 minutes long.