Thursday, May 12, 2011

Agility...

I think that an agile is the enterprise where everybody think and act agile. If an eterprise praises just its champions, paladins of the 'best practices' but does nothing in changing the mentality of its management and process staff that is a non-agile enterprise

It is really not enough to have best practices posted in some obscure wiki inside the company, the best practices should become habits of every developer. It is not enough to make web casts 'bout the wonderful agile techniques, scrum and TDD but those concepts should be built in in the MANAGEMENT style.

Why agile managers? Because engineering is ever taken seriously when they propose process improvements and reduction of paperwork. Management should realize that agility is finally about money. Reducing the tasks that are not revenue generating means that the productive ones will increase and the work will be more
productive.

Finally the customer does not give a shit about waterfall/agile but it expects quality and commitment - the same virtues in a project that every PM is looking for. Agile methods (especially XP) have this by design and they produce onlythe exact quantity of results for a successful project.

Further more an agile corporation has people that train themselves, it encourages self training and the adoption of new technologies from ground up. It is totally wrong to use the 'champions' for preaching. Evangelization is not preaching. It is nice to have evangelists - they are gifted, smart, well read and inspired. Preachers are just annoying screaming dorks who know a subject by approximation. Developers inside an agile company learn 7 languages in 7 days because they want it, because they are interested in their craft. Non agile ones stick to one technology, to one language. They might be very good ones, but  they are like dinosaurs, they will fear change. They will flock for secure change opportunities with lots of trainings and coaching and then, after mastering the subject again they will stick there again in the same immobility and fear... Agile ones will learn Lisp or Erlang by themselves in order to simplify some annoying tasks in their project and will be able to advocate and evangelize that among peers.

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