Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson gave a closing plenary session at Agile 2010 in the form of a dialog with lots of few cute photos thrown in for fun.

Ha refers to the Shu-Ha-Ri model of Beginner-Practitioner-Master from Martial arts. Stuck in Ha means that as a community we are practicing and unfortunately a lot of what is going is not that great.

Ron and Chet were courageous in touching on the sensitive topic of certification (a controversial subject in the community).

Training is the start, not the end

Consider the road of life-long learning in the diagram (top right corner) below. If our goal is mastery and learning, then courses and certification such as CSM (Certified ScrumMaster), CSD (Certified Scrum Developer) just start us on this road.

Need to map the territory

In order to plan where we want to go, it is helpful to have a map. Right now, we only have part of the map identified – maybe a few states. Initiatives such Agile Skills Project, ICAgile and Scrum Alliance Registered Education provider are ways the community is seeking to build the map. Once we build the map, we can share this with individuals and companies to help them travel the road of learning.

The Joy of Agile is about shipping software

A fundamental tenet of NLP is that the map is not the territory. The map only guides us. The real territory is something different and much richer. Education and certification is a means to an end.  Agile is about shipping quality software and delivering value. We can only find that in the real world and not in certification and credentials.

Dave Thomas talked about a lot stuff so I pulled out the bits that resonated with me and bear emphasis.

Starting with the top right and going clockwise, I’ll make a few comments…

There is no Agile toothfairy to make all the problems go away. A lot of companies only look to Agile when things are really broken. It took your company a long time to create the mess that it is in and it is going to take a while to get out of it. Agile will help and provides a direction and it is going to take hard work. Sorry.

When you have no automated tests in place, acceptance tests add much more value than unit tests. So, consider starting here before learning about JUnit, refactoring and working with Legacy Code.

TDD (Test Driven Design) is a huge technical contribution to the community that stands independent of Agile. It is an amazingly powerful design practice.

We were reminded that a flat org structure with a technical career ladder is essential in a well-functioning organization. It is important to keep your top technical people in technical roles.

Dave has seen the rise of what he calls blue collar programming. So many environments are filled with legacy code. Programmers have to sweat out meaningless design-dead code just to make things work.

I attended Israel Gat‘s session with this title at Agile 2010. I was already familiar with some of the concepts based on a private seminar given to my coaching circle by Michael Spayd.

For me organizational change is a hot topic since I keep running into it when adopting Agile practices.

Schneider Model for understanding Culture

Israel introduced the Schneider model for understanding company culture. The idea is to use survey questions to categorize the dominant culture into one of four categories (see below).

Many companies we work with are a control culture while Agile is all about Collaboration and Cultivation and (sadly) to a lesser extent about Competence.

You Can’t Change Culture

“Culture is singularly persistent” – Drucker. It is estimated that it can take 10 years for the culture to change in a large company.

Consider the chart in the middle of the diagram below. If we want to be successful in adopting Agile (or anything else) it is essential to focus on harmony with the existing culture. Pushing for different culture will lead to conflict.

Agile adoption leads to conflict

This is an observation rather than a pejorative. With the best intentions Agile will accidentally lead to conflict within the organization. The example given was of different cultural biases within different departments.

For example, Competence in Engineering and Control in Operations. In addition to differing departmental objectives, us vs. them thinking will also create tension. Israel talked about the Outmodel that describes perceptual bias that we create when we have limited information about a situation. The idea being that by design of our organization, there will be conflict between the groups and Agile adoption only makes this worse by perturbing the system.

One idea proposed by Israel is to create a boundary object between different groups. In the case of Development (Engineering) and Operations, one could use Technical debt as a way of measuring the quality of the code to satisfy ops that the code was production worthy. So a  boundary object that has a quantitative measure is very helpful. IMHO, there is much more than this required to ensure that code is production-worthy, but that’s another story.

What I learned about myself

In one exercise we broke into the four groups to explore the different cultures. I went to Control because I have struggled with a few organizations with this culture. What I discovered is that I personally have strong control tendencies. I also discovered that control can save a lot of time by decisive action. The trick is knowing when to apply it. I experimented with my workshop later in the conference and was happy to see that very strong direction around group logistics and exercise structure can make a session more coherent and valuable.

And now for something completely different

Clarke Ching shared a great 6 min animated video on organizational change by Eli Goldratt. It is related so, I’ll throw it in here…

I am really excited to have two sessions accepted at Agile 2010 in Orlando. As I am a big fan of pairing to get high quality, I am happy to say these are both pair-designed and will be be pair-led with other great coaches.

The biggest bang for the buck! Strategies to organize & prioritize your backlog – with Gino Marckx is an introductory tutorial and simulation that is part of the Product Management Stage. (Dry run at XPToronto meeting in June)

Look before you leap – Agile readiness assessments done right – with Gerry Kirk is an expert-level workshop that is part of the Agile Adoption Stage. (Dry run at Agile Coach Camp Canada) Check out the program links for more details.

I would like to thank everyone who provided input on the draft sessions in the wave, as well as the comments from reviewers. Oh, yeah, and a big thanks to Gino and Gerry for partnering with me on this.

BTW, there is no official Agile 2010 Speaker logo that I am aware of – I made up the one above