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 .
