Agile

Creating and sustaining a successful agile program requires a strong commitment and careful planning. Yet ruining a functional agile initiative is remarkably easy. John Edwards (CIO (US)) 25 October, 2017 21:00   0   0       print   email 0 Comments "Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan" is a saying frequently cited by contemplative business leaders. Yet when it comes to failed agile initiatives, the old bromide might be updated to state: "Success is a team effort, while failure is simply everybody's fault." No new agile program aims for failure. Yet poor planning by an unprepared and ill-informed team that fixes its sights on unrealistic goals will usually doom a project from the very start. Want to ensure that your agile initiative will collapse into a heap of twisted hopes and dreams? Well, here are seven simple steps to help you get started: 1. Plan loosely and chaotically One of the great myths surrounding agi...

IT leaders can’t get people comfortable with "failing" fast. No wonder. Start talking about what you're really doing: researching, testing, innovating, and acting quickly up 2 readers like this By  Mark Schwartz   October 19, 2017 In the agile community, we talk a lot about the need to accept or even encourage failure, and the advantages of “failing fast.” This talk of failure is uncomfortable to many who are trying to make the transition to  agile  and  DevOps  culture. IT team members, taught for years never to fail, struggle mightily with the notion that it’s now OK to fail. Leaders struggle too: “What would my board of directors say if I told them we were encouraging failure?” Or for a government agency, “What would Congress say?” or “We’re accountable to the public! We can’t deliberately set out to fail!”  I think the issue here is a matter of language. The agile community wants t...

Steve Denning   ,   CONTRIBUTOR I write about radical management, leadership, innovation & narrative.     Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Shutterstock Last week, I found myself in a lively conversation with some colleagues about the true meaning of agile management and how to communicate it. How do you determine whether a team, a unit or an organization is — or is not — agile? An ability to answer the question simply, clearly, and consistently can be critical inside an organization, particularly a large organization. For one thing, many different flavors of agile have been disseminated by advocates, as shown in the figure below. These variants were issued with the best intentions. But in the resulting cacophony, it is easy to lose sight of what is essential to agile. And it’s even easier for critics to conclude that perhaps agile is no more than noise and confusion. Lynne Cazaly Graphic by Lynne Cazaly reproduce...