One of my favourite scenes from Tombstone is when Ike Clanton says to Wyatt Earp, “Listen, Mr. Kansas Law Dog. Law don’t go around here. Savvy?”  After Wyatt replies that he’s retired, Ike reiterates “Yeah, that’s good, Mr. Law Dog, ’cause law don’t go around here.”

A common theme that has been emerging from the classes I’ve been delivering and conversations I’ve been having are along the lines of “wow, we need to change our culture” or “agile won’t work here because … <insert excuse>“  There seems to be a clear delineation between these 2 camps.

I blogged previously about the importance culture has with an Agile transformation and I make sure that I convey that to anyone I talk to that is new to Agile.

The first statement I usually use to combat this fear, uncertainty and doubt is the fact that there always must be a reason to transform to Agile.  Companies aren’t switching for the sake of being cool and hip, well if they are they have bigger problems, but instead they are switching because fundamentally, the way they are working is broken.

Transforming to Agile requires a deep organizational commitment and a fundamental shift in how companies operate and how departments and people interact with each other.

So underneath the skepticism and FUD, what’s the REAL problem?  What are people afraid of?  Here’s a brief summary of the top 3 excuses for why Agile don’t go ’round here:

1) We can’t have a SINGLE product owner, we need multi-level signoff and too many people are “the go to guy”

2) Agile won’t work here, everybody works on multiple projects at the same time.

3) Management tells us we HAVE TO launch with all these features on this date.

Hmm.  So what do we do?  Where’s the Agile checklist that allows us to fix these problems?  I’ve seen Scrum teams absolutely banging their heads against a wall trying to figure out why their fixed-date, fixed-scope projects either don’t make it or have terrible quality.  In this cas,e the ‘rapid de-scoping phase‘ happens in order to make the date but in that instance the damage is already done.  The teams inability to say no has rendered their yes useless, mis-trust ensues and the cycle repeats itself.

I’ve had this post brewing for a few weeks and decided to post it after our pilot team’s recent success and after reading Gil Broza’s great post entitled “so you think you’re Agile?”

While our topics do differ, the underlying tone is the same.  Organizations needs to understand what being Agile is.  They need to look to the manifesto, not to the Nokia Scrum test or a checklist.  They need to un-learn what has been instilled through so many years of the command and control approach.

AYE helped me change my approach from saying “here’s what you’re doing wrong and here’s the right things to do” to “what are you concerned about?  what are your challenges?  how can the knowledge and tools I have solve your problems”

Lately that approach is working much better and I find people who want help are more likely to accept help.