Why the Agile Community is Awesome
I was bummed to miss out on Agile Coach Camp in Columbus a couple weeks ago so I had to settle for enjoying the tweet stream. One such tweet that stuck out was this one:
“The #agile community is too closed. We are doing intellectual incest, and congratulating ourselves for it.” ~@mhsutton #ACCUS“
I can understand and appreciate the comment, I’ve posted many times about how I think the Agile community is disconnected from the reality that organizations are going through. Having said that, I’d have to disagree with the statement that the Agile community is too closed. Read more
Understand How the Work Evolves
Growing organizations can fall into the trap of thinking scaling is easy. Simply add functional departments to break the work into compartments, flow it through the system and voila, infinite scaling! I’m often perplexed about how the structures I see in organizations are similar regardless of the type of work they are doing.
There’s usually a development team, test team, release team, product team, implementation/support team etc and these groups are usually silo’d each with their own hierarchy. Perhaps fodder for another post, I find that these structures and hierarchy often mimic manufacturing. Put some requirements in one end and out pops the toaster from the other end.
You can avoid scaling problems, or at least minimize them, by understanding how the work evolves as you grow. Read more
Solving the Agile Certification Problem
I studied electronic engineering in college and my lab partner had a 4.0 GPA compared to my paltry 2.06. I’m ok with that, I needed to work full time midnights to support my extravagant life style finding last-day-for-sale hot dogs and Kraft dinner.
Whenever lab time rolled around he couldn’t put together a basic circuit to save his life. His strength was his strong memory, theory knowledge, and the ability to speak abstractly enough about the topics we studied so his reward was good grades.
But he couldn’t DO the work.
Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in a recent interview (http://gigaom.com/2010/09/10/a-time-capsule-of-mark-zuckerberg-from-2005/ ) that some of his best hires had no programming experience and one of the employees who wrote the Facebook photos application was an electrical engineer, not a software engineer.
I’m not going to go into great detail about the good and bad of the various types of Agile certification, all I’m proposing is that we in the Agile community figure out a better way to build skill within the community and a better way to provide organizations with the right skills they need to be successful. Read more
