Agile iconoclast or staid status quo?

Agile2007 Day 5. The best thing about this conference is that there is very little of the agitprop found at most conferences. Whereas the majority of conferences are vendor heavy, Agile2007 emphasized education and the sharing of ideas, experiences and passion around doing the smart thing in software development and project management. How refreshing. I found the whole experience invigorating.

One theme from the conference is that agile is hard to do because of the change involved. Every speaker I listened to mentioned the difficulty of moving to agile. Mike Cohn said it. Ken Schwaber said it. Gabrielle Benefield of Yahoo! said it. But they also said it was all worth it to see productive teams being successful.

Speaking of Mike Cohn, he gave an outstanding presentation on transitioning to agile. Some of his suggestions for success included using the scrum framework to help the executives transition the organization just as the software group uses scrum to help effectively create shippable software at the end of a sprint. In a messed up organization the executive team needs to create an organizational change backlog and sprint through these to help bring about the corporate changes needed to support the move to agile. This is similar to an example I heard from Roland Cuellar, Director, Lean-Agile Consulting Practice at CC Pace, about a group of lawyers who started using scrum effectively after seeing the results in the company's software group. Mike also talked about different approaches to transitioning to agile, from the conservative approach of a small seed team to the example of Salesforce.com where Mike helped transition 35 teams at one time.

Traditional software and project management methodolgies are hard to change because they incorporate lots of assumed knowledge and must do processes, just because we do it that way. It was so nice to hear all the experts and practioners of agile at Agile2007 say that moving to agile is a hard change, even a continuing challenge, but that they wouldn't do their work any other way now that they've seen the results. I'd say that this type of honesty is a pretty compelling endorsement to go ahead and investigate the pros and cons of agile for yourself and your organization. Going agile is a rigorous undertaking that takes passion and dedication, but it's worth it. VersionOne, a conference vendor, has some survey statistics on agile that support investigating further the possibility that agile might work for you. Find the survey here.

Diets don't change your habits, change is altering the way you do things. A diet works for a short time, but a real change breaks the habits that took years to create, one day at a time. Habits are hard to change, but the results are lasting and worth the effort. Agile is a status quo breaker. Iconclasts break molds and bring upheaval. Agile is madras plaid juxtaposed against an old drab khaki. Think Rodney Dangerfield on the golf course in Caddyshack. Be the Rodney Dangerfield in your organization and shake things up.

Make your plans now for Agile2008 in Toronto.