In an effort to become Agile and/or Lean, many organisations in Australia are attempting to design their own custom Agile process from Agile and Lean principles at the time at which they are least qualified to do so - before they have started.
This might appear to make sense if you set out to 'implement the Agile Methodology' * or 'do Agile' *. After all, aren't you acting in the adaptable spirit of Agile to pick and choose which practices you adopt and how you implement them? Every organisation is unique, right?
In reality, organisations taking this approach, tend to pick the easy 'low hanging fruit' that are easy for them to adopt over those that offer the most improvement over the status quo. In pulling up stumps early and 'wimping out' of the harder organisational changes, such organisations unconsciously stifle their teams' ability to reach for high performance and limit the organisation's ability to go beyond "good" to be truly "great". They may also be missing the essential understanding that Agile practices were designed to work as an inter-dependent system of disciplined practice. As Kent Beck put it: "No single practice works well by itself, each needs the other practices to keep them in balance. If you follow 80% of the process you get 20% of the benefits."
If, however, you set out to be a high performing organisation, this may not be adequate.
So...
What if there was a way to avoid a half-baked 'Agile-ish' approach producing half-baked outcomes? What if you could get there by "standing on the shoulders of giants"?
What if there were a simple formula for becoming truly Agile?
(Genuinely living the Agile Software Development values and principles.)
What if this simple formula also implicitly implemented the core principles of Lean and did so in a way based not on repetitive Lean Manufacturing of physical objects but on a type of Lean that is much more appropriate for complex knowledge work and systems development?
What if this formula also implemented the management/leadership approaches suggested for a Complex problem domain as per the Cynefin framework?
What if this formula enabled rapid cycles of learning about both:- what the customer really needs and- what techniques are required to rise to the challenge of delivering it using contemporary technologies?
What if this formula was proven to scale and could support you through the Agile Journey from pilot to whole-organisation transformation?
What if this formula was self-correcting in terms of both your project outcome and your processes themselves?
What if there was a way to unlock the full synergistic potential of teams and realise truly high performance?
69. Creating the Scrum formula
See Jeff Sutherland explain the creation of Scrum at:
youtube.com/watch?v=O7cA1q0XwhE
If you missed this session/section, this is a good
summary of what was discussed in this section.