At AgileOpen, A session I suggested was particularly lively: Should Agilists Regroup?
A couple of weeks ago, I had listened to the Naked Agilists podcast, where Brian Marick had expressed his view that the Agile population had been diluted in the Conservative group of the IT world.
My goal in this discussion was to see if this vision was shared by others, and if yes, what can be done about it.
The argument from Brian is that there are few pragmatists in the world, and most agilists are now working on Conservative projects. Most of them cannot get the 10x gains that they were hoping for, just incremental gains, acting as firefighter for those projects. One example was a team of agilists in London who had found the Extreme Tuesday meetings, and who are now scattered on various projects. (as a side note, I couldn’t find a working website for XtC meetings, which is telling, I suppose)
Brian feels an option is to regroup, re-energize, work on fully Agile projects, and innovate again. However, he does not mention how he sees that happening in practice.
In this session, I wanted to understand if there was truly something that we were missing on here, and hear about solutions that fellow participants may have.
First, the conversation focused on what ‘regrouping participants’ meant. Was it ‘practicing what we preach’? breaking down barriers and work on common project (be they programming or anything, really)? making the agile legacy last?
This much was not cleared up. However, it was clear that this whole idea was unpleasant to most. Thoughts of getting cut from our clients came to mind (it should be noted that many/most participants work for service companies). Also, many balked at the idea that their time on clients’ projects might not be creating enough value.
Another thing is that many actually enjoy helping clients. An agile-only group was compared to an ivory tower, or to the elfs leaving Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings (indeed I find in this an echo of Brian’s words: “let them eat cake”). All in all, regrouping was perceived as a demonstration of nostalgia, a mostly sterile look in the rear mirror. What matters is here and now, and where we want to go.
That said, there were proposals of groups that have been formed. ConcordiAgile (a consortium of Agile companies in France that includes Valtech) was mentioned by Bernard but I feel that it is falling far short of Brian’s ambitions.
As for me, I am convinced that the Agile world needs a Toyota. My reasoning is that Toyota did not bother with evangelizing Lean (except internally and to its suppliers). Instead, it concentrated on producing great cars, and eventually it overtook its competitors. It is Toyota’s success, and not the qualities of its process, that forced GM, Ford and the others to implement Lean.
If we could build such a company in software, then after some time (10? 20? 50 years?), it too would spawn imitators.
Maybe Google is this company; but it is too early to tell. According to some reports, Google does use Agile methodologies especially for its backend operations. Not for (most of?) the client-facing applications, though, where the process seems to favor creativity.
Event though I am convinced that an Agile company is the right way to go for Agile, I am not even sure I’d be willing to create it. I am at core a engineer, a consultant, not a manager. And it is possible that this is the case of many IT professionals in France.
