Open Space - March 7, 2007

Theme:

Agile: -- A Reality Check.

- does the practice live up to the theory; does the theory need more practice?

- touching reality to reinvigorate the dream

- key points we've made; key things we haven't said (yet)

- answering tough questions about: the project, the team, the coach, the job

Sessions:

Does an organization have to go through the pain of waterfall and have their back completely against the wall before they will try Agile?

Host: Lyssa Adkins

Attendees: Steve Metsker, Michael Euripides, Mike Vizdos, Cara

Discussion:

• Yes. At one company 6 years ago, we knew about Agile but thought we couldn't get the whole company up on Agile, but we could better get the whole company up on waterfall. Now, Agile is there. How did that happen? From the realization that it was taking us 300days to deliver a project. In the first pilot to reduce time to market, we used Lean - that was good, but not good enough. We heard about Agile and decided to try. The first coach was critical to that success - that person was all about the people and the team.
• You need a mixture of grassroots (gotta start with one success) + someone at the top who says "this is OK to try" and who "ringfences" the team and allows the team to be able to fail; to lose the fear; to lose the risk aversion
• When Sr. level person comes in an says "we must use Agile" the organization pushes back and just waits for it to blow over.
• Why do pilots fail? 1. What they're after isn't attainable anyway 2. too wide to be focused
• It's easier to introduce change when something hurts; easier conversation opener to say "where does it hurt?" But they have to feel the pain.
• How high does the main need to be felt? CIO? Probably not so much, but at a manager level who can provide some cover.
• People have shown a tremendous ability to ignore pain.
• You gotta wait for your chance.
• It's not about Agile, it's about getting people to change their minds.

To all participants: Please edit if I did not capture your thoughts faithfully.

Suggestions:

For each session, include topic, host, attendees and some info about the session.

That info might be one or more of the following: notes, key quotes, observations, questions, action items, differences of opinion, etc, etc.