Joshua Kerievsky of
Industrial Logic gave the first
keynote speech at
XPDay . He talked about selling agile methods.
Here's what I took from the session:
- When you sell something people will resist by voicing their
objections. Most people interpret the objections as rejections
and then become defensive. An objection is not a rejection. More
often than not, the objections are founded on a lack of
understanding. So inform them. Give them better information on
which to make their decision.
- Most people try to sell something by selling its benefits. Instead, sell something by selling the risks of not doing it.
- When a team uses agile methods successfully, the surrounding organisation may begin to attack them (I've seen this happen so many times). Joshua described these people as organisational antibodies. The best thing to do is to start selling agile methods to the organisational antibodies as early as possible to lay a path for future agile projects and communities.
