There’s been a visible increase in the take-up of Agile development methodologies in the last year or so, but it’s often just seen as ‘the latest fad’ when we initially start talking to an existing or prospective customer about how it can increase the return on a technology investment. As a relative ‘old timer’ in IT (some 12 years and counting) I can relate to people’s ambivalence to the ‘next great thing’ being trumpeted. Part of the problem is communication.
I worked with an organisation not too long ago who were so impressed with how productive and responsive the Conchango team were in delivering an application using agile methods, they thought they’d adopt it across the whole programme we were involved in. The trouble was, this fact was communicated to the troops on the ground with a blanket email that said “Agile is great. We’re gonna use it with immediate effect. Read these ten documents to find out more.”
Unsurprisingly, a good chunk of the next couple of weeks was spent pulling people down from the ceiling and explaining that it wasn’t the latest ‘junk Yank management fad’ and was really just about applying a bit of common sense to your day-to-day.
A couple of weeks ago I had a rare respite from the daily commute into London and spent a day in the leafy suburbia that is Egham (well, at least it had a Nero’s these days). I sat next to a colleague who was preparing a for a presentation he was giving to technologists in the Financial Services sector about Conchango’s pedigree in delivering Business Intelligence solutions in the sector. He’d recently completed a BI projected that we’d delivered using the ‘Scrum’ agile framework and wanted to talk a bit about his experiences and posed aloud the question “How do you best go about selling ‘Agile’?”
“It depends who you’re selling it to” was the perhaps unsurprising consultancy response, but a valid one all the same. Having worked with a few clients in the last couple of years where the Agile methodology proposed was new to most people involved, I’ve often been in the position of needing to explain what it’s all about and how it’s going to impact various members of a project or programme team, from business analysts, developers and testers through to infrastructure, training and support folk and we certainly shouldn’t forget the user community, investment board and other stakeholders.
People are often somewhat deflated when I open with “Well, essentially it’s about common sense”, though many are quick to recognise that sense is typically un-common when it comes to IT project delivery. Agile has lots to offer for people involved throughout the whole project lifecycle:
· Prioritisation of activity by business value helps ensure a return on investment.
· Focus on delivering production quality increments of functionality helps avoid the last minute scramble of bug-fixing (which all-too-often gets cut short).
· Empowering the delivery team helps foster a sense of ownership and pride in what is being delivered.
· Honesty and transparency in the process, which is often the biggest culture shock helps highlight problems sooner rather than later, reducing the cost of corrective action.
· Continuous feedback on progress means that what gets delivered is what users and stakeholders actually want
· A recognition that change is inevitable and should be built into the process helps avoids the bun fight of change management, late delivery and cost overruns.
In short, Agile is about a set of principles that are pretty obvious if you take the time to reflect on it. The challenge is in living by a set of disciplines that make it work – which will be the subject of my next post.