On Wednesday night Andrew Scotland ran a workshop at the second Agile Practitioners Forum. The event was organised by Les Oliver and Simon Voice and sponsored by Radtac and Connections Recruitment . The venue was the Gun Room aboard the HMS Belfast .
The topic for exploration was bringing about the change necessary to accommodate the adoption of agile methods. At the heart of introducing agility into any large organisation is a huge amount of cultural, behavioural and organisational change. Andrew hypothesised that sometimes the need for this type of change is the primary driver for the introduction of agile methods and can be more important than the traditional drivers of improved ROI and improved engineering practice.
Andrew provided a brief introduction that charted the BBC ’s journey so far, where the introduction of Scrum (less focused on team behaviours and roles) proved more successful than the introduction of Extreme Programming (at that time more focused on engineering practice). The result is a prioritisation of the agile values where collaboration comes top.
During the workshop, we will split into 4 groups to brainstorm factors that support change and factors that resist change. We then used a technique called force-field analysis to indicate the relative strengths of the factors.
To close, Andrew hosted a plenary where each group shared their top 2 supporters and resisters of change which were then discussed by everybody.
The top factors that support change are:
- Empowerment/Authority
- Fashion (agility is trendy so take advantage of that)
- Desire to succeed
- Sponsorship
- Buy-in
- Commercial, business and technical advocates
- Business drivers
- Command and control
- Fear
- Politics
- Sick teams
- Silos
- Dogmatism
Here is the BBC ’s force-field:
apf-jan2007-1
Originally uploaded by sjb140470 .
