Sorry for the lack of writing the past few weeks, I simply haven’t found anything that I wanted to blog about. Today though, when reading my feeds, I stumbled on a post from Mike Cohn promoting his newly published book. In short, you can win a copy of his new book “Succeeding with Agile” by leaving a piece of advice in the post’s comments:

To win, enter as a comment to this post the one most valuable bit of advice you would give to a team that wanted to succeed with agile. I will pick the one bit of advice I like best and send the author a copy of the book. I will also pick a second winner at random from those who submit. So, you’ve got two chances to win so let’s hear your best one bit of advice.

My piece of advice is the following: “Know why you are willing to walk down this path.” Once you know, you’ll be able to make the right decisions as to what practices to adopt, remind people in the organization in case of doubts and most importantly stay focused on what you and the team have defined as the reasons for the change.

Apart from a different scale, is it much different than to adopt Scrum in a small sized company? I tend to think the same organizational and systemic dynamics come into play: company culture, senior management support, communication channels, work environment etc.

Is it the scale of everything and how deep the company culture is rooted that might make things a lot tougher?

What do you think? Can Scrum survive in the world of fixed scope and date, top-down management, lengthy weekly email reports with hundreds of recipients in CC, big bang releases with multi-million € Marketing campaigns?

I would love to read your comments on that one!

Update: Point 1 from this comment pretty much nails my thoughts on Agile in the Enterprise. It can’t work if the leaders don’t change.

* First of all, the current economic crisis requires constant improvement: if you want to stand out of the lot, you need to differentiate yourself and always continue to develop your skills and competencies. If you don’t do that, somebody else is going to eat your lunch. Am I going to let that happen? No way!!

* Secondly only focusing on one aspect or vision about a specific topic can never be a positive thing. Broadening your knowledge can provide perspective and help you make the right decisions. Although Scrum has been at the center of my daily work for about 2 years now, I wanted to compare PMBOK and Scrum and see what differences / commonalities there are. Maybe I’ll write about this…

* Finally I would say that project management is also about picking the right set of guidelines (or call it framework / standards) to allow successful delivery of a project. There is no silver bullet – Scrum isn’t, PMBOK isn’t, Prince2 isn’t, therefore a great project manager will know when to use which methodology to make the most of the project team and get customer satisfaction.

Let’s see what’s next…

In my opinion, the current economic situation will accentuate the contrast between organizations that succeed late and those that fail early:

1. There will be organizations spending even more time trying to determine if a project is worth doing – that means these will probably do that even more, bet their year on a couple of key projects and see the benefits at a later stage.
2. There will be organizations spending even more time doing projects that will fail or succeed early – that means these organizations will spend more time doing projects rather than talking projects, bringing concrete results early.

The financial crisis means you have to start getting real. My hopes are that organizations will realize this too, and will spend more and more time doing projects.

What do you think the effects of this economic downturn on project management are/will be?

The concept is based on the idea that individuals generally understand things much better when they are learning by doing. Don McGreal and Michael McCullough, the people behind Tasty Cupcakes, ran a session at Agile 2008 on how to use games and exercises to help improve our understanding of Agile principles and practices. [InfoQ]

This repertoire of little games, sorted into 3 categories (Physical, Emotional and Impressional), can be a very nice resource for Scrum Masters or any other change agent willing to be a little creative when educating teams with Agile principles and practices.

Definitely on my list of things to try out!

Is it when you picked a methodology like Scrum or XP and follow the associated principles? Is it when everyone in the development team has read the book Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager’s Guide? Is it when you feel totally powerless when asked to get back to a more traditional approach like Waterfall?

According to the above mentioned blog post, “more than practices are required to be agile”. In essence, doing daily stand-ups, having a product backlog, drawing an iteration burndown or doing continuous integration alone is not enough.

Beck argues that all “practices, values and principles” need to be part of the mix in order to be really agile. (read more on Beck’s views over here). So where to start? How do I start being Agile? Really there must be a point to start from…

Do you start with communicating Agile principles around? Do you buy software that allow to manage Agile life cycle products? Do you start doing daily stand-ups? Do you start doing continuous integration? Or do you start being Agile with a small team of talented developers on a small pilot project to get the first feeling of what it takes “to be Agile”?

That’s a lot of questions and the reason why I cannot seem to answer them is that after all being Agile may be something you feel rather than something you teach or learn. From this perspective, I believe learning by doing i.e. using a specific methodology with carefully picked practices would be a good way to get started, get a feeling of Agility, one Sprint at a time.

By the way, beginning of June I will be attending a 2 day training in order to officially be certified Scrum Master. Does that mean I’ll be Agile?