Welcome to Agile Colony. These are my thoughts, opinions, experience and viewpoints about Leadership, Corporate Culture, Agile Software frameworks, Technology Trends and other various aspects of Business Technology.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Annual Budgeting and Agile IT, Part II: Why Agile Gets Compromised When It Goes Corporate
From: The Agile Manager (Ross Pettit)
In corporate IT, the CFO isn’t trying to solve a “make better use of capital” problem in the business. He or she is trying to solve a “consistent cash flow from operations to service our capital obligations” problem. When Agile goes corporate, it is subservient to, and most often compromised by, that latter problem.
Beware of Agile Job Postings…
“Wanted, Agile Project Manager…or Agile Expert/Guru, Agile Coach/Trainer or Certified Scrum Master”…sounds awesome right? Perhaps.
Most jobs requiring agile knowledge and expertise genuinely do come from true agile shops or shops that have hit the wall with other methods and sincerely want to make the transition, but be careful, know the warning signs of “not so agile” or “agile wanna-be” shops.
Agile has been all the rage for many years, it’s really old news. Startups and small companies don’t know anything but agile frameworks and in my experience, execute scrum/xp, FDD, Kanban and other frameworks to the letter. It’s the big I.T. houses that worry me the most. I am a huge fan of them taking the steps towards Agile methods, but when I see things in job postings such as:
“Experience with all phases of the project management lifecycle”
“Must be able to work in both Waterfall and Agile environments”
“Proven ability to manage both matrix and direct resources”
“Six Sigma and/or PMI certification”
“Expertise required in Microsoft Project”
…I have to think a big, “Say What?” on all counts. These are not bad requests, they make sense for a lot of companies, but a true agile company? That doesn’t seem right at all. There’s a lot of “heavy weight” process assumption in those statements. There’s also a “we can’t staff projects with 100% dedicated resources” sound with using the term “matrix resources”. Microsoft Project? Really? I would have expected ScrumWorks, VersionOne…how about even Xplanner?
One could dismiss most of this If there were a disclaimer or a requirement in the posting that clearly stated this is a company making the transition to agile.
In short, read the fine print. There are many great agile shops delivering working product in tight iterations with high quality and not all the compliance and administrative needs. Look before you leap or you might land in a staunchly traditional development shop posing as one that practices agile properly. It is a VERY common reality my agile purist friends.
10 Lessons In IT Strategy From Ex-HP CIO Randy Mott
Some very timeless advice from one of the most top-ranked CIOs.
