Yves Hanoulle asks, “If you could change 1 thing today what would it be?” as the first question in his Agile Retroflection of the Day project. Today being the first of the year, it’s natural that I look back over the past year as I consider this question. And so I answer,
That people could ask for, and could accept, the help they need and want. (Continued)
A few weeks back, in a conversation with a colleague, I raised some issues that were important to me. Well, I tried to raise them.
“Don’t worry about that. Besides, I’m working on these other issues that are more important.”
That response reassured me–NOT! (Continued)
There’s been some discussion on the XP Yahoogroup about the practice of “blocking” in order to protect an Agile team in a non-agile corporation. I’d gotten rather behind in my reading, and came into the middle of the discussion. I’ve just now tracked this discussion back to a post by Scott Ambler, where he says,
This is a great example of something that I call blocking, where you produce the paperwork, attend the meetings, pretend to care, … to make it look as if you’re following the “official process”.
Scott is responding to a mention of the use of PERT on the Polaris submarine project. Scuttlebutt says that PERT was deemed a great success in managing the Polaris project, but in reality the PERT charts were reverse-engineered from more seat-of-the-pants management techniques. As the stories go, this “scientific” management technique wowed the Congressional oversight committees, and such techniques have been the backbone of government contracting oversight ever since. (Continued)
Esther Derby posted an excerpt of a Management Consulting News interview with Jerry Weinberg where he answers the question of how to overcome resistance, “Yes. Don’t.” Oh, he says more there, and he can say a lot more on the topic, but that’s enough for the intro to this article.
You see, I wanted to write an article with a shining example of a time when I didn’t try to overcome resistance, but used it to advantage, instead. The problem was that I found myself in the trap that Don Gray frequently mentions, that when someone tells you not to think about something, you can’t help but immediately think about it. So what filled my memory was a time when I had tried, eloquently and earnestly, to overcome resistance on the part of my client. (Continued)