Agile Culture and Adoption Survival Guide from Agile New England on Vimeo.

P.S. I am actively working on an eBook for those who prefer print. Drop me an email if you want to help review it before it comes out.

P.P.S Slides are here.

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Agile Failure

I did a hand vote to see how much failure people had seen with Agile adoption they were involved in. See photo on the right: most of the group rated their experiences with Agile success at 3 out of 5.

The results were pretty much consistent with the other times I have  run this: about 50% failure. I guess we can call this one – Agile is heading for the trough of disillusionment. But I haven’t given up – it’s time to up our game and turn this around.

Culture at Participant Companies

 Participants were worked in small groups to discuss what was the dominant culture at their company using the Schneider Model.  The photo below shows a histogram of the dominant culture. The peak is 30 participants identifying a control culture. It is interesting to note the relatively high 16 for Competence culture (vs. previous workshops) that represents the high density of hard-core engineering companies in the Boston area.

Closing Thoughts

Maybe the 50% failure is because 50% of the companies are control culture. Probably not entirely true, but this may be a helpful meme that allows us to change our approaches and behaviours to succeed.

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Here is what I said:

These results (Agile fits better with some cultures) have been validated through group workshops where participants performed the same activity after having an explanation of the culture model.

Workshop Format

1. Handout the  Schneider Model to everyone.
2. Form into groups of 4 to 6 people.
3. Each group selects a handout with either Agile Manifesto, Agile Principles, Kanban Principles, Software Craftsmanship or Declaration of Interdependence.
4. Groups draw Schneider grid on a flipchart.
5. Each principle is written on a sticky note and posted in the most appropriate quadrant.

Results

The following results were from an XPToronto User Group session earlier this year. I also ran this at SoCal LeanKanban and got similar results, but my camera sadly wasn’t working so I have no evidence.

Kanban

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The results here are pretty clear – Kanban is centred around Control culture. So two groups with strong agreement with the proposed model.

Software Craftsmanship

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The group on the left suggests that there is slightly more emphasis on Cultivation culture while the group on the right assigned the most items to Competence culture.

What support is there to the claim that Software Craftsmanship promotes Competence culture (as based on the manifesto)? In this case, I would say it is partially supported by the results.

These results indicate that language is not precised and that the experiment would need to be repeated several times with discussion and reconciliation of results to get a clear outcome. 

Agile Manifesto and Principles

When I ran the workshop in Toronto, no group picked this, so we did a large groups swarm where40 people just wrote out an item and posted it. That’s why there are duplicates. There was a little bit of clustering like items.

The diagram shows Collaboration culture as dominant followed by Cultivation. The term “working software” appears in both competence and control. In my analysis, this terms was ignored because it doesn’t have a strong fit with any of the cultures.

This result supports the claim that Agile is about Collaboration and Cultivation Culture.

Declaration Of Interdependence

The results of this have been written up in an earlier blog post - DOI? Cultural Shotgun

Conclusions

These results provide some support for the hypothesis that each of Agile, Kanban, and Software Craftsmanship have a cultural bias. It is worth noting that this experiment suffers from method bias in that participants were using the same analysis process of assigning attributes from manifesto to the culture model. An alternate workshop/experiment (just invented) would involve having participants brainstorm what are the most important values and then map them to the culture model.

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What follows are some of the models and deep insights that were developed about Agile and how it is experienced at companies. Even though I know a fair bit about adopting Agile, I still find I learn a lot hearing these stories.

Scrum Alliance Leadership

See related post Scrum Alliance Leadership – Models for Success

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Confused about adoption vs. transformation?  Check out ways to make progress with Culture Gaps.

Agile Mindset – Do you want it?

Jon shows the following short video of IDEO design group to illustrate the Agile mindset and the type of servant leadership needed to support it.

After watching the video with executives who want Agile, he checks in with them:

• “Is this what you really want?”
• “Are you prepared to change your own behaviour to support this?”
• “Are you ready to go first?”

The approach outlined here is to go big or go home. Go big means to help transform an organization or division. Go home, means that rather than help adopt a few Agile practices that may disrupt the organization, to stop work and looks for clients who really want Agile.

Leaders Go First!

The remainder of the presentation is about how leaders can go first by adopting Agile principles as a management team. Jon summarizes this as:

• Live the values
• Lead by example
• Be as transparent as the teams they lead

Here are some example activities for the management team:

• Public display of values
• Visualize projects and plans
• Visual management of key information: people, technology, etc
• Daily stand-up meeting in public place

Thank you Jon, for sharing this at Agile 2011.

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Last weekend, a group of local Agilistas got together for BBQ, drink, and to play with Lego. Well, not just play, but StrategicPlay® – with a purpose. And wow, what a result! The outcome was some deep insights into the Agile community that we’d like to share with you.

Setting the Stage

After a brief introduction and practice with StrategicPlay® model building and sharing, everyone proposed a topic for the session by building a model and explaining it. After voting (with little wee Lego coins), the group decided on the model/topic show to the left: it contrasts the low level of connection within the Agile community and outside with other communities with the ideal/future state where there is a very powerful coherent tower of strength in the community.

Individual Visions of Agile Community Challenges

Now that the topic was establish, everyone built their own model of it and took turns explaining them. Below, for example, is an individual model. Even though it was by the same participant who created the topic, the process of listening and sharing resulted in a dramatically different model. It tells the story of seemingly growing success of Agile as a movement, but coupled with a disconnect in making a difference with much of the corporate world. The possible elephant in the room is that perhaps Agile is and always has been about innovators and early adopters.

Here is another one – showing factions arguing with each other in order to produce commercial success while the great challenge of waterfall waste is left largely unchallenged.

 A Shared Vision of Agile Community Challenges

The next challenge was for the group to work together to create a shared model that:

• Represented the most important concept from each person’s individual model, AND
• Everyone felt comfortable will all parts of the shared model

Although I only facilitated the process, I felt a strong connection with the model and ideas in it.

Credits

Credit for the model goes to : Alistair McKinnell, Jason Cheong-Kee-You, Jeff Anderson, Siraj Berhen, Todd Charron, and Sam DeBoni. Great work!

StrategicPlay® looks powerful – What can I use it for?

StrategicPlay® is great for working out solutions to complex problems. The more complex, the better.

It has a wide variety of applications from: team building and organizational change to product innovation to developing company strategy.

If you are curious to learn more about applications or the science behind why this stuff works so well, please read a more detailed description.

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For more information, please see Agile Culture Series Reading Guide.

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For those of you not familiar with it, the DOI could be characterized by re-write of the Agile Manifesto to be more positive and less waterfall-bashing.

I have had an uneasy relationship with the Declaration of Interdependence. On the one hand, people that I respect were part of creating it or supporting it. On the other hand, it never really resonated with me.

At last week’s XPToronto meeting, three groups picked the DOI to do a culture assessment based on Schneider’s model. Here’s what they came up with:

Some of the comments made by attendees were:

• “The ideas span all the cultures.” (Including opposing ones)
• “It looks like a shotgun of ideas.”
• “Even specific statements have conflicting cultural focus; it was hard to place them.”

Discussion

From the perspective of the Schneider culture model, the DOI is unfocussed. Schneider suggests that groups that are successful typically have one dominant culture. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the DOI has never really caught.

If it works for the companies you work with, please share your stories via comments.

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There were some interesting results that came up in the workshop component that I will share in upcoming posts. As well, I am thinking of doing a screencast of this so I can get my message out better.

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