This morning I had the pleasure of having breakfast with Martin Fowler. (Note that there were about another 200 people at this breakfast).
Thoughtworks hosted their quarterly briefing this morning with Martin Fowler and Andy Marks presenting “Agile-Adoption – How to stuff it up”
Its an interesting time in my current project, and not unlike many other organisations we’re starting small, adopting a few key technical practises, and trying to operate in stealth mode.
It was an interesting discussion, which touched on a number of key issues which cause agile adoptions to fail. Not a complete set, but perhaps some of the more common reasons:
- Underestimate change
- Assume minimal cultural impact
- Learning finishes at school
- Let other people fail – we’ll take it from there
- Experience is overvalued
- De-emphasize techncial design
I took away a few notes from the breakfast which resonate because of our current project. Fowler opened the presentation with a short blurb about the roots of Agile and talked particularly about adaptive planning and the people first approach. Its the latter that really makes me want to adopt agile. It’s the opportunity to work with and develop a great team of quality people that excites me.
Of course ‘people over process’ is part of the Agile Manafesto, but I sometimes forget how important the people in our team are in helping to deliver this project. It was also good to hear about issues that we’re directly experiencing; what Fowler described as the ‘early pain principle’ and failure. They sound horrible, but as I discussed previously they’re not always negative things. Tomorrow morning is my third sprint retrospective – I’m planning not to fail.
In the coming Sprint we need to re-focus on technical design, its important to understand when you’re code base is beginning to run away from you and its been a bit like that in the last week. I’m hoping to take stock in the next Sprint as well as use our progress to date to develop our design in certain areas. This to me is a priceless benefit of Agile. My initial design no longer cuts the mustard – no surprises, so we’ll address that.
Andy Marks delivered a great presentation, but it was a point made during Q&A by both Fowler and Marks which really stuck in my mind: Trust is such a vital part of Agile, we have to trust each other – the team, the customer, everyone involved need to have trust for a project to succeed – again its the people that matter.