Myths and Dangers of Agile Day 1 Myths and Dangers of Agile... Keith Richards Director KRC...and what to do to avoid them!

The Myths and Dangers of Agile...

Keith RichardsDirector

KRC

...and what to do to avoid them!

Presentation Structure

• What is agile exactly?

• The problems with agile

• Solving the problems of agile

• The myths and dangers of agile

• The way forward with agile

• Further information

• Close and questions.

Introductions

• KRC is a pioneering training and consultancy company

• Specialising in Agile approaches to how organisations work

• Focusing on improving Agile capability at scale

• 15 years experience in PRINCE2 and DSDM Atern

• DSDM Membership Director (formerly Technical Director)

• IAF Accredited Facilitator

• Author of ‘Agile Project Management’ (TSO).

‘Agile is now mainstream…

…everyone should have a position on agile’.

…but what is agile?

What is perceived as agile?

• Index cards and user stories

• Daily stand-ups

• Whiteboards, Burndown charts

• DSDM, SCRUM, Lean, KANBAN, XP

• Pair programming

• Catchphrases – YAGNI, IKIWISI

• Aspirations – ‘adaptable’, ‘proactive’

• Agile testing

• Agile organisation.

What is agile?

• Defined by the Agile Manifesto in 2002?

• Scope tolerant

• Collaborative

• Iterative

• Inspect and adapt

• Responsive to change

• Incremental build

• Business focused

• Communication focused

• Quality focused.

Do we have a problem?

We are getting successes but are they agile successes?

…or are they ‘no brainers’

• small teams

• organising a to-do list

…what about scaling?

…what about at the corporate level?

We do have a problem!

• Agile outside ‘solution delivery’ rarely exists

• Agile outside ‘business as usual’ rarely exists

• SCRUM, Lean, KANBAN, XP are not ‘Project Management’

• ‘Agile Project Management’ is perhaps an oxymoron

• Agile 2.0 is inevitable

• There is more to agile than being a broad church

• Project management basics are often ignored

• Up-front work?

• Standard PM Structures?

How do you solve the problems?• Understand the type of work – project or BAU?

• Understand the different layers of a project:

• Governance/Direction

• Project Management

• Solution Delivery

• Understand agile at these levels

….and the limitations

• Think about the culture of your

organisation

• Think about the implementation of agile change.

The 9 biggest agile myths

• SCRUM is an agile project management approach

• Agile is a method

• Agile is binary

• There is a family of agile methods

• Heavyweight approaches cannot be agile

• You start with a ‘backlog’

• Agile is quicker/faster

• Be emergent

• Agile scales naturally.

The 9 dangers with agile

• It arrives bottom up

• It looks simple

• Mixing oil with water

• Start with timeboxing or SCRUM

• Self-organising teams

• The Product Owner

• Allowing it to spread virally

• People upstairs just don’t get it

• Letting tools drive the transition to agile.

The way forward

• Analyse the gap

• Shop wisely at the ‘church of agile’

• Manage the change – facilitate it – at all levels

• Focus on the cultural fit – think about WIIFM

• It’s a long journey – one year, two year?

• Get common sense to be common practice.

A final thought!

Stable Agile

Which was has more governance?

Further Information / Next Steps

• KRC help organisations with their transition to Agile

• KRC offers a variety of Agile training (AgilePM/DSDM specialists)

• Maturity assessment (‘project health check’)

• Downloads at www.agilekrc.com

• Facilitation and mentoring

• DSDM Consortium – www.dsdm.org

• The DSDM Group (LinkedIn)

• Twitter @agilekrc

• Agile Project Management: running PRINCE2 projects with DSDM Atern

(available from the DSDM web shop or TSO).

The Myths and Dangers of Agile!

Any questions?

[email protected]

www.agilekrc.com