Traditional Agile

I’m no fan of religious wars like the one around waterfall and Agile so episode 190 of The Project Management Podcast was refreshing.  Among other things there was this concept that you take what fits you from two or more methodologies.  I can go for that.  No more one size fits all…

What do you think?  As always questions and comments are welcome.

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Comments

[craig]

Pat, have a look at Snowdem's Cynecin model for an example of assessing the context and understaning appropriate models for action.

Interesting stuff.

[Patrick Richard]

Craig,

Thanks for pointing Cynefin to me. I'll dig into it.

[Bill Nichols]

Taking what fits has a big caveat. How do you know what to take, and then how do you now what actually works.

My harshest critique of agile is the tendency to pick and choose a la carte, from a variety of methods guided only by experience and intuition. Good practice is then replaced with snake oil. That's why my cell phone takes so long to get through testing and then crashes repeatedly in use.

So the questions you must answer are
-Why do you think this will work?
-Do you have some examples where it did?
-Any where it did not?
-How will you judge success?

[Patrick Richard]

Hello Bill,

Thanks for the comment. I often go for quick comments that do not fully explain my train of thoughts so let me flesh this out a little bit.

I do not suggest a wholesale change from traditional to a “take what fits you” approach. Trying to change from a known, imperfect, state to a fully formed suture state would constitute what you called snake oil. I’m thinking more of a slow evolution to new processes. Identify what hurts the most, identify a potential solution, implement it slowly and to a limited audience, work with it for a while, asses the results, adjust as needed, and roll out to everyone. Repeat until the major pain points are gone.

A few things to think about:
• If it is not broken, don’t fix it. Change for change’s sake is a big mistake.
• Things will never be perfect however hard you try. Stop when the situation improves enough.
• Rushing in change will cause failure due to pushback. Incremental works best.