In part 2 of the series we reviewed some ways to bring an inexperienced development team up to speed on some of the core concepts and fundamentals of agile. This week we will talk about the same topic but with a different target audience. Management.
Now a good friend of mine, and colleague that I learned agile and scrum under just wrote a great blog post on how to communicate the need for agile to be introduced in an environment where there is resistence. There is some great advice here for that particular topic, but for this post I am going to talk about my experience bringing agile to a company.
I was very fortunate in that I was brought in to the company that I work at with this specific purpose in mind, how to move us from being a service based company to one that had more focus on product development and more so how to increase efficiency and how work flows through the company.
Now that being said, your probably thinking “wow, talk about the dream job, you get to come in, with a mandate and with very little resistance or push back”. Well your wrong. Just because everyone agreed that we would do this and we were all on board there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to educate management.
Educating management is a whole different beast. Were not talking about getting them to learn new concepts, operate as a self managing team. Were talking about getting people who run a business to completely change the way they work. Gone are traditional functional specs in, is customer collaboration and just in time planning. No more cowboy coding and long ridiculous hours in, is doing things right, negotiating with your team. Out goes control and in comes trust.
That last idea is always the major sticking point i’ve found, the one thing that takes the longest time but has the largest amount of benefit in the end. When you trust that your team is going to to do what is best for the business and what is best for the team you are going to start hitting your agile stride.
Now one last point before I finish up. This relates to managing an agile team but it’s something that I’ve picked up over a couple of years of experience in working on agile teams. A successful agile implementation makes your development team very happy, and in turn keeps a lot of your employees right where you want them. In your office churning out amazing work. I’m not sure if employee retention was a desired outcome of running an agile shop, but in 3 years at my last job we lost one scrum master and one programmer before I left. 3 years and only 2 people in the dev team left (and the reasons weren’t all related to agile). Everyone running a business knows that one of the silent killers is employee turnover, it costs a lot of money to find train and get new people integrated into a team. Especially in the development world these types of turnover not only cost the company money but it introduces all kinds of other delays and issues.
So am I saying that by implementing agile at your shop your going to instantly have a bunch of super happy developers that never want to leave?
Well that’s entirely up to you! If your a large company, grab a small team on a small project and let them try agile. If your a small company, get your entire development team on agile right away, let them try, let them fail and most importantly let them learn.
Oh, and don’t forget to take some notes yourself, agile doesn’t just work for developers you know…
Infecting a team with Agile: Part 3: Educating Management
In part 2 of the series we reviewed some ways to bring an inexperienced development team up to speed on some of the core concepts and fundamentals of agile. This week we will talk about the same topic but with a different target audience. Management.
Now a good friend of mine, and colleague that I learned agile and scrum under just wrote a great blog post on how to communicate the need for agile to be introduced in an environment where there is resistence. There is some great advice here for that particular topic, but for this post I am going to talk about my experience bringing agile to a company.
I was very fortunate in that I was brought in to the company that I work at with this specific purpose in mind, how to move us from being a service based company to one that had more focus on product development and more so how to increase efficiency and how work flows through the company.
Now that being said, your probably thinking “wow, talk about the dream job, you get to come in, with a mandate and with very little resistance or push back”. Well your wrong. Just because everyone agreed that we would do this and we were all on board there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to educate management.
Educating management is a whole different beast. Were not talking about getting them to learn new concepts, operate as a self managing team. Were talking about getting people who run a business to completely change the way they work. Gone are traditional functional specs in, is customer collaboration and just in time planning. No more cowboy coding and long ridiculous hours in, is doing things right, negotiating with your team. Out goes control and in comes trust.
That last idea is always the major sticking point i’ve found, the one thing that takes the longest time but has the largest amount of benefit in the end. When you trust that your team is going to to do what is best for the business and what is best for the team you are going to start hitting your agile stride.
Now one last point before I finish up. This relates to managing an agile team but it’s something that I’ve picked up over a couple of years of experience in working on agile teams. A successful agile implementation makes your development team very happy, and in turn keeps a lot of your employees right where you want them. In your office churning out amazing work. I’m not sure if employee retention was a desired outcome of running an agile shop, but in 3 years at my last job we lost one scrum master and one programmer before I left. 3 years and only 2 people in the dev team left (and the reasons weren’t all related to agile). Everyone running a business knows that one of the silent killers is employee turnover, it costs a lot of money to find train and get new people integrated into a team. Especially in the development world these types of turnover not only cost the company money but it introduces all kinds of other delays and issues.
So am I saying that by implementing agile at your shop your going to instantly have a bunch of super happy developers that never want to leave?
Well that’s entirely up to you! If your a large company, grab a small team on a small project and let them try agile. If your a small company, get your entire development team on agile right away, let them try, let them fail and most importantly let them learn.
Oh, and don’t forget to take some notes yourself, agile doesn’t just work for developers you know…