Almost no one on software teams believes in waterfall any longer. That's what we learned from the surveys we took in the course of authoring The 2013 Study of Product Team Performance. But that doesn't make agile a magic pill. Mike Cohn notes, "Becoming agile is hard. It is harder than most other organizational change efforts I've witnessed or been part of [for reasons] including the need to change from the top-down and bottom-up simultaneously, the impossibility of knowing exactly what the end state will look like, the dramatic and pervasive changes caused by Scrum, the difficulty adding more change on top of all that is already occurring, and the need to avoid turning Scrum into a list of best practices." How do we get beyond that? Glossing over the reality that agile is hard leads us to ignore the very things we need to address to succeed. On the other hand, acknowledging that agile is hard lets us focus on the challenges that have been preventing us from becoming high performance teams. This session combines a presentation, a panel and some shared thinking to move beyond how simple agile seems - to what in fact makes agile transformations hard - to how we can face down those challenges to achieve agile's promise. Expected Takeaways (outcome) for Audience * For those just starting agile transformations: a heads-up that implementing practices only goes so far. For those well into agile but struggling, a sense they're not alone. For all of us, a window into how to get to where we want to go.

1. Agile Is Hard!!
!
!Ron Lichty, principal, Ron Lichty Consulting
author, Managing the Unmanageable!
www.RonLichty.com, www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net !

2. Our Distinguished Panel
• Pollyanna Pixton
– Principal, Accelinnova
– Author • Stand Back & Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility
• The Agile Culture: Leading through Trust & Ownership
• Brian Drummond
– Senior Agile Coach, LinkedIn
– Formerly: Yahoo!, Apple, Adobe, IBM, U.S. Government
• Jason Kline
– Agile Coach, Salesforce
– Formerly held Engineering and Agile Leadership roles at
NAVTEQ, Nokia, and Good Technology

3. Ron Lichty,
Managing Software People Teams
SOFTWEST

4. * Addison Wesley published October 2012
*

5. Rules of Thumb / Nuggets of Wisdom*
* 300 in the book

6. Waterfall and Agile

7. Waterfall and Agile
Methodology
You
Use
Methodology
You
Associate
with
Increase
Profits
Agile
Blended
(Some
Waterfall
and
Some
Agile)
Lean
Waterfall
Agile
73.9%
13.0%
9.8%
0.0%
Blended
(Some
Waterfall
and
Some
Agile)
31.8%
46.2%
10.6%
6.1%
Lean
14.3%
0.0%
42.9%
14.3%
Waterfall
15.8%
50.0%
18.4%
13.2%
Don't
Know
5.3%
42.1%
26.3%
5.3%

8. Waterfall and Agile
• So if Waterfall is so unprofitable, …
– …if waterfall has all these wasteful practices
• Then Agile must be easy?

9. Agile Seems Simple
• It’s just that thing developers do

10. Agile Seems Simple
• If we just follow a few practices…
– planning, standups, demos, maybe retrospect

11. Agile Seems Simple
• It’s all about delivering iteratively…
– we’ve been doing that for years

12. Agile Seems Simple
• And then we wonder…
• Why aren’t we getting the results we expected?

13. Agile Is Hard
• It’s not about the practices
• It’s about the values
• It’s about the principles

14. Agile Is Hard
• “Becoming agile is hard. It is harder than
most other organizational change efforts
I've witnessed or been part of [for
reasons] including … the need to avoid
turning Scrum into a list of best
practices.”
--Mike Cohn, xxx

15. Managers and Agile
• Supporting Agile Values
The Agile Manifesto
– We value:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
-- http://agilemanifesto.org/

16. Agile Is Hard
• Doing large-scale projects is no easier in
agile than in anything else
– SAFe is as complex as Kniberg’s model at Spotify!

17. Agile Is Hard
• We don’t leverage development
managers to help
– We include them in training, sometimes
– But we don’t train them for their roles

18. Agile Is Hard
• We all need to change!
– Scrum masters can't act like project managers
– POs have to be available, have to order backlogs
– developers can’t just take direction
– managers/directors/VPs can't change targets mid-sprint
• Everyone needs to understand WIIFM
– what do I get out of making this change?

19. Agile Is Hard
• We have to become learning
organizations

20. Moving Beyond
• Revisit the values and the principles
regularly
– Use them to guide how we each must change
– Use them to guide whether our practices are true
• Become a learning organization
– Train your managers
– Value learning for everyone
• Evangelize your larger organization to
embrace agile
• Celebrate agile wins – if only less waste

21. Our Distinguished Panel
• Pollyanna Pixton
– Principal, Accelinnova
– Author • Stand Back Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility
• The Agile Culture: Leading through Trust Ownership
• Brian Drummond
– Senior Agile Coach, LinkedIn
– Formerly: Yahoo!, Apple, Adobe, IBM, U.S. Government
• Jason Kline
– Agile Coach, Salesforce
– Formerly held Engineering and Agile Leadership roles at
NAVTEQ, Nokia, and Good Technology

22. Ron Lichty Consulting
• Mentoring, coaching, interim and acting CTO / VP Eng roles:
– http://ronlichty.com, Ron@RonLichty.com
• The book:
Managing the Unmanageable:
Rules, Tools Insights for Managing Software People Teams
– http://ManagingTheUnmanageable.net -----tools, excerpts, more rules of thumb
– http:www.informit.com/agile -----special prices: agile titles
• The study:
The Study of Product Team Performance
– http://ronlichty.blogspot.com
• Training:
The Agile Manager
Managing Software People and Teams