In the last
Agile Practitioners Forum there was a debate
about why there is a need for organisational change when using
agile methods. At least 2 people were arguing that there isn't a
need to bring about change outside the project. The majority,
however, were saying that there comes a time when the wider
organisation becomes a constraint and inhibits a project team's
ability to improve further and achieve higher levels of quality and
throughput.
A bugbear of mine, and I've been harping on about
it
again and
again and
again , is how many organisations
restrict adaptation to how they practice agile methods. Some
practices are used and not others, principles are ignored or
compromised, values are not understood and little is done to
establish an ecosystem in which project success can be achieved.
They refuse to entertain the idea that
the organisation needs to adapt
too . As
George Dinwiddie says:
Organisations want the benefits of Agile, but they don't want
to give up the cubes and solo development work. They don't trust
the team to self-organise and create valuable software, so they
stick with organisational frameworks that prevent the very things
they fear won't happen.
One of
Brian Marick 's themes about
agility is that it's about
acting to change the context more than it is about adapting
to suit the context . Inevitably there needs to be some
local adaptation because agility is in constant interplay with its
environment. But organisations need to empower the people doing the
work to ask themselves "what should I change about my environment
that would enable me to work better?" and then take the necessary
actions to bring about that change. When an organisation is trying
to achieve agility, restricting change to just the project imposes
a glass ceiling on a team's ability to get better. This is
effectively capping human potential and that can't be good for the
organisation going forward.
Monday, 9 July 2007
Adaptation and organisational change
Posted by Simon Baker - Permalink
2 Comments
Organization has to change, CUSTOMERS have to feel the need to change!
My 2 euro-cents.
PierG
http://pierg.wordpress.com
That's a very important point. When we introduce agile the first things that become very clear are all the organisational constraints. All the ways the organisation is broken. At this point many organisations retreat and revert to producing lose ends rather than complete, running tested features. This way they can hide the dysfunctions.
This is a time for celebration, however.
Only when we go through this phase will we start really collecting the benefits of the transformation.
The transformation does not stop in the team - you eventually have to transform the whole organisation. Once you really buy into the culture of constant improvement there is no turning back.
I believe this is for the better and my experience is that it is the most challenging part of the transformation process.
BTW - I'm hosting a session on the topic of how to introduce agile practises at the Agile 2007 conference next month.