This last week I was with a number of our extra-large customers and prospects.  A common theme with these large and very successful high technology companies was the statement “growth hides all issues.” 

When we are growing rapidly, we all tend to focus on investment and hiring just to keep up and not limit the growth.

I remember this same feeling at BEA Systems in 2001 as the tech bubble popped. In our Boulder office, we found ourselves staring at 10 times more people than we started with in 1999.  Even though we took Extreme Programming (XP) teams into that growth, we ended up with a 100+ person and multi-location, waterfall process.  Our team reacted by putting back in XP engineering practices and large-scale, nightly, integrated builds to increase visibility and feedback.

zero-sum-thinking

Picture from Pegasus Communication - Leaders in Organizational Learning and System Thinking

A Two-Pronged Approach to Agile Adoption in a Recession

What is critically different about Agile adoption in this recession is the need for a two-pronged approach. In December, I wrote for Tech Target on two-pronged approaches to cutting budget while implementing Agile development. This is a systems thinking approach that is effective at breaking myopic thinking.

I was thrilled to see this approach used in the President’s stimulus package – short-term tax cuts to stimulate and provide relief coupled with future-looking government investments in more sustainable and equitable infrastructure. Without this type of approach, myopic thinking tends to increase the chances of “Fixes that Fail.”

It was a really good week last week.  As a result of this positive feedback, our team is going to devote a substantial amount of blog space during early 2009 to covering the strategy, approach, myths, and success stories around the use of Agile development to cut costs and simultaneously prepare for future growth.

Please stay tuned, link back your stories, comment, subscribe and consider your actions.

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