News Flash: Agile Requires Culture Change (mLearnCon 2015)

Editor's Notes

1. Yes. You do need to get your team, your clients (internal and external), your boss and your SMEs on board with this. Because if you don’t, yes, it is likely to fail miserably.Ok, so maybe not miserably, but you’re on to something here. Agile is more than a project management method. It’s a culture. The good news is that it solves many of the sticking points with the old waterfall-based approaches to projects. It’s a matter of communication, communication, getting results and communication.
2. OBJECTIVE 1: Describe Agile project management methods to your clients, teammates, and stakeholders When you get right down to it, Agile, like any other project management approach, seeks to manage SQERTS.
3. Now, 4 vague statements and 12 principles are hardly a sufficient project management system … but they set the stage for the several variants of agile that have evolved over the last decade or so. They all share a few things in common …
4. Now, 4 vague statements and 12 principles are hardly a sufficient project management system … but they set the stage for the several variants of agile that have evolved over the last decade or so. They all share a few things in common …
5. You know that you’re using Agile when you recognize these hallmarks.
6. OBJECTIVE 2: how do Agile methods resolve inherent shortcomings of traditional methods (ADDIE) that project sponsors are used to?
7. OBJECTIVE 4: Build the culture that supports an Agile project team This gets us back to this statement. You do need to get your team, your clients (internal and external), your boss and your SMEs on board with this. Because if you don’t, yes, it is likely to fail miserably. This is all about culture. Let’s take a pragmatic interlude here and review what culture means.
8. Implementing Agile is often viewed as implementing a new tool & maybe one that will change the culture Agile can start to change the culture, but the culture also has to change for Agile to work effectively Agile processes provide guidance for its own adoption (implement, evaluate, iterate) Agile is going to impact your culture in terms of all that “culture in the air”: Communication methods Management styles Degree of collaboration Definitions of success
9. In his work as a consultant for organizations undergoing change – William Schneider worked had plenty of opportunity to observe the culture in the air of many organizations. Throughout his work with these organizations, he and his colleagues realized that organizational cultures fall into one of four models. In The Reengineering Alternative: A Plan for Making Your Current Culture Work, he describes each model and suggests how to work within that model to make improvements that align with the cultural tendency of the organization. Schneider is the first to point out that this is a simplistic overview and that no organization displays characteristics of only one quadrant. However, it can be a useful framework to explore an organization’s culture and make decisions about the best ways to implement change. This approach to assessing organizational culture came out of Schneider’s work in the 70s and 80s. Schneider’s book implies that organizations with any of these cultural models can be successful as long as everyone within the organization is aligned (in the main) with the overriding cultural model. More recently, some have begun to argue that control culture organizations have a more difficult time adjusting to the knowledge and skill expansion that rapid technology changes require. Regardless of broad concerns about the value of various cultures, in the world of Agile, particularly Scrum, there is a growing consensus that some models support an Agile approach more than others. More about that later.
10. So how does Agile fare in each of these different cultures? We can analyze by distributing Agile principles to the quadrants they most reflect. Agile skews to the left and lower quadrants. Theoretically it plays well in any quadrant but anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that Kanban does OK in control but Scrum really only works in left side organizations.
11. So, assuming that Agile is something new and different for your organization, how do you go about introducing it? Choose a skunkworks or a fishbowl model – either way you shelter the team from some of the “rules”