When organisations have an inefficient software project management practice or are struggling with never-reducing backlogs, they consider to adapt Agile. Then they bring some Agile consultants and expect some changes to happen. In most cases they don’t understand that going for Agile is actually a larger-than-expected cultural transformation across all stakeholder groups like internal/external customers and product management. Heavily depending on external consultants is like placing traffic cops from other countries in the roads with heavy congestion and expecting improved road traffic. It may be working. But it is probably not working properly.
Another interesting observation is people’s bias on their ability. This is about the well-known Overconfidence Effect. People tend to believe that their ability (e.g. Driving) is better than average (actually median). I have observed a few people who strongly believe they understand the Agile concepts and Scrum methodology well and the way they practice Agile/Scrum goes right way.
So what can be the bad combination in an Agile team?
- Scrum masters that do not understand the organisation’s culture
- Development team with over-confidence on their current practices
- Customers who do not want to engage in Agile
And what can be the results? I see the results different mostly based on how people react to the situations they don’t want to be encountered.
- Scrum masters with strong ego may try to push their way ahead. Despite their strong belief in their direction and their strong skills, they can get backlash from developers and internal organisations if they don’t carefully study the current culture of the organisation. In reality, they need strong support from top-level management.
- Scrum masters who want to be easy-going with less conflict generate less noise. But soon they might feel that they are a bit useless.
- Developers from different Agile culture get easily tired when they observe that something is not working properly or in the way they expected.
- Internal customers never engage in providing right stories. Rather, they would like to throw a huge document with everything in it.
The right steps for the Agile evangelist are
- Understand the strategy of the organisation
- Understand the culture of the organisation
- Understand the new culture that the organisation needs to have.
- Find the right way to implement the change. Study famous top-down cultural change processes.
- Force-Field Model
- Kotter’s Eight-Stage Model
- Plan the implementation of new Agile culture
- Build the right team for the change
Unique Constraint 