Surviving Your Inevitable Agile Transition

As agile software development became mainstream, agile transitions routinely failed. This resulted in chaos, infighting, an exodus of top talent, and to this day leads steadily to the demise of agile’s reputation. This has left many people exhausted and cynical. Some feel as though they’ve been cheated and lied to. Others insist that their people didn’t try hard enough. Still others are holding their head in the heads wondering what exactly happened.

If you’re facing an “agile transition”, you might be facing it with dread instead of hope, and I don’t blame you.

You can adopt agile software development practices and principles and it can work! To do this, you’ll need to pay attention to what your predecessors and your competition have ignored: you must seek out your organization’s values and understand its problems before you can expect the agile toolkit to produce results.

Learn from your competitors’ mistakes. Enjoy the kind of success that agile software development approaches promise.

Audience

If any of these sound like you, then you’ve found the right course.

• You are involved in an ongoing agile transition that is showing signs of failure.
• You are starting an agile transition and want to get off on the right foot.
• You are an executive who believes that agile software development would fit your organization, but who fears that the typical chaos that tends to come with change.
• You are middle manager whose bosses tell you both to “go agile” and “don’t be late”, and you wonder how exactly you’re supposed to do that.
• You are a project manager who feels anxious about how these new practices will affect your project’s schedule, the way you plan, and your feelings of control.
• You are a technician (programmer, tester, product owner) who feels pressure to do the same old things that just don’t work, even though the organization around you is telling you to “be agile”.
• You work on a team inside a larger organization that insists on “going agile” and you’d like to figure out how to do good work even if the world around you never quite figures it all out.

Key Topics

• “Agile” is not just something that “the teams” do.
• Pouring Scrum Masters into the organization doesn’t work.
• How to avoid the typical destructive divisiveness that tends to accompany adopting new ways of working.
• Scrum, Kanban Method, DSDM, XP… it probably doesn’t matter.
• The common agile practices that would probably hurt you right now, rather than help.
• How to use the Theory of Constraints as a starting point for guiding your transition.
• The two archetypal and opposing reactions to uncertainty, and how to navigate the fallout.
• Being agile about your agile: incremental change, continuous improvement, incorporating feedback.
• The centerpieces of any agile approach: cashflow, feedback cycles, and people.

Activities

• Lectures with question-and-answer sessions and group discussions.
• Individual and group exercises.
• Build plans for various aspects of your organization’s transition.
• Practise asking questions without annoying the people we question.
• Draft proposals to adopt new practices designed to achieve buy-in and commitment.
• Group consulting sessions.

Preparation

Participants need the following to attend this course.

• Something to write with, and something to write on. I suggest index cards or sticky notes and a notebook.
• If you have one, a tablet for drawing diagrams when presenting information to the group.
• Courage. We will probably get into some difficult topics.

Remote Training Preparation

Please do the following at least one day before the course is scheduled to start.

• Upgrade Zoom to the most recent version.
• Check audio, video, and screen sharing on Zoom.

Delivery Options

This course is currently available only as a private live/remote course.

The standard course is available as 6 sessions of 1/2 day each delivered in two formats:

• Intensive, with sessions scheduled with a 2-week period
• Weekly, with one session scheduled per week

The course is suitable for groups up to 20 people. Larger groups should run the course multiple times.

It is recommended to add follow-up working sessions to be scheduled 1 month, 3 months, and 6-12 months after the course ends, as a way to support the group as they apply what they’ve learned to their daily work.

Start the booking process for your live/remote course.