Tag: Resistance

Accomplishing Organizational Transformation

Scaling Agile across the Enterprise attracts a lot of attention these days. There are a number of models suggesting ways to organize Agile development inside a sizable organization with a lot of teams. I suspect that all of these models share the same basic flaw—that you can do something the same way across a large enterprise. Even if your policy manual says exactly how to do something, people are people and there will be variations in understanding and execution. And how does a team self-organize in a prescribed manner?

Beyond that, there’s the problem of getting from current state to a future state that resembles the model. It does not work to “install” a new way of working across a large system composed of people and their interactions. Some people suggest starting the transformation with management, as that’s the “highest leverage point” and the “system’s major influencers.” Others suggest starting with the teams, because without competence at building reliable software (or other systems) in short cycles of small steps, you’re not going to get the benefits of Agile Software Development. I don’t think that either of these starting points work.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe” — John Muir Read More

Agile Retroflection of the Day

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. Read More

“Blocking”

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. Read More

Overcoming Resistance

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. Read More