Agile Development Blog

Last Thursday, Dave West from Forrester and I did a live webinar on Scaling Agility with Lean: Proven Methods of Operational Efficiency.

We received lots of great questions and shared them with the webinar attendees, but thought they would also be valuable to other Agile practitioners. This first series of questions tackle the obstacles of adopting Agile. Stay tuned for the remaining questions in later posts.

You can also check out the first webinar, hosted by Jean Tabaka and Johnny Scarborough from Global Logic, on Realizing the Promise of Agile: Creating Leaner, Meaner and Faster Product Development.

DW – is Dave West from Forrester

RAM – is Ryan Martens from Rally

What are the biggest blockers you see to good Agile?

DW – My pet peeves are people that resist change without really thinking about it. That treat software like car production and think that you can plan, deliver in that manner. These same people often lament the ability of the software teams to deliver good code at the right price. Software is a fundamental part of business change – If you need a new part to your business it will most likely require software, which may require development and integration. Connecting up their development with the people who have the problem is the first step to success, empowering teams to try new things and question the status quo in support of those business needs is key. Organizations that put artificial walls between the problem and the solution are the biggest blockers. These may come in the form of planning processes, business access, travel budgets, governance models, standards or culture.

RAM – Good Agile development is a mindset change like Dave is describing above. Overly aggressive or passive plans are the biggest blockers to “good Agile.” You need to think about this change as incremental and iterative with a strong focus on continuous improvement and learning through inspect and adapt feedback loops.

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On Thursday, March 19th, Dave West from Forrester Research and I will be doing a live webinar titled, “Scaling Agility with Lean: Proven Methods of Operational Efficiency.” It is part of a webinar series regarding “Using Agile to Cut Development Costs.” Our own Jean Tabaka and Global Logic’s Johnny Scarborough did the first webinar titled “Realizing the Promise of Agile: Creating Leaner, Meaner and Faster Product Development” and it is available via recording by registering at this same site.

In this week’s webinar, I am going to share a set of models that I  keep being asked about. These slides show the changes that happen in the enterprise stage gate model as your Agile adoption moves up and matures in the organization. To hear the explanation behind these slides and see Dave West’s work on Lean, please join us on the webinar.  The full slide deck will be available after the webinar.

Not to steal all of my thunder, but there are two things that interesting about this transition.

1. The Agile stage gates of 3.1/4.1 actually provide more governance control than the old gates.
2. The first and last gate are not going away in large organizations anytime soon. You just don’t start projects without budget and you do not make a gold master for production without blessing from operations or overall system testing.

Lastly, Dave’s observations about how these stage gate models require a Lean organization approach, should make for a great conversation. I hope you will join us.