Cliff Berg的动态

They say a bad carpenter blames his tools. The fact leadership blames Agile and Scrum speaks loud and clear and those behind a reimagined Agile needs to clarify why it's come to this. Honestly. who and what is to blame? At least be explicit and transparent about commercialising Agile. I have no problem with that blatant truth. It stares so beamingly clear at me. If leadership needs to learn how to live with Agile and 2.0 is the way to put it to them, go for it. Agile was never intended to spruik agility. Agility is more likely the unintended spawn, an excuse by the many for their own failings. Stop blaming Agile. No one claimed it would be easy. Both Agile and Scrum requires personal, team and organisational commitment and discipline. Just because a few don't get the meaning behind playing Go does not mean Go is dead. Just because one is impatient to excel doen't mean Shu Ha Ri precludes excellence. Else, perhaps the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.

Ok, Silver Bullet didn't work, so let's try Silver Bullet 2! None of the frameworks has ever been the problem. The silver bullet thinking is the issue. People should define the problem that needs to be solved and use critical thinking for finding an ideal way to solve it. Sometimes a plan based software development model is the right way to go and sometimes an agile way is needed. Agile frameworks like SCRUM are good when they are appropriate and the organization is willing to pay the cost that comes with it. Every approach comes with its own costs and benefits. This is not my original wisdom by any means. This fact is emphasized in any technical university and again emphasized in a Scrum Master certification training. Maybe the root cause for the unsuccessful software projects is that companies don't listen to the experts that they have hired. I believe that many companies have hired thousands of people with Master's degrees but still treat them like they were just workers in the bottom of the hierarchy. In many cases, people in the middle and on top of the hierarchy are mostly interested in just extracting as much cash out of the company as they can, so the perspective gets crooked very easily. How can any framework work?

I hate biting on this, …. But here goes: The king is dead, long live the king? Hating agile is easy, hating on projects too… Saying agile is dead because leadership was forgotten, says more about the people Implementing than about anything else… The “silver bullets” are sold and bought by exactly those leaders that forget to include themselves. I’m no agile zealot myself and lots of stuff goes wrong and also … mistakes are made (myself included obviously). Yet, lots of the principles, values and frameworks are helpful to reach “real” agility. However: to create sustainable learning cultures (aka agility), it is hugely helpful to have dialogues on the meta level, to reflect and take time to understand differing perspectives, with ALL participants. Without that, nothing will help… after that, you can have a look at those agile tools, practices etc etc and see whats fitting in your current situation. Remember: slow = fast.

In the leadership development space, the impact of agile as a philosophy is not pretty. I consistently see supposedly self-organizing teams with zero leadership or management development exposure, reporting to a manager with roughly the same amount of development exposure who has, at best, a basic awareness of agile practice. Repeat upwards, until you reach the HiPo leaders who have had all sorts of training and support, who choose to implement agile because consultants package it up as "improved speed and productivity". Execs buy it without knowing anything about agile as a practice beyond this packaging as it isn't included in the leadership development programs they have been exposed to. In short, you have: - Agilists with little awareness of the practices of leadership - Leaders with little awareness of the practices of agile - An huge cohort of team and UB leads with little knowledge of either A case in point - on your website, I see a call to adopt the servant leadership model and that leadership styles are personal. Best of intentions - but partial, limited and flawed. Effective leaders do not have one style. They have situationally adaptive styles, which they match to context. Happy to chat if you're interested.

I have some crazy idea: Most of the scrum masters I know maintain some kind of list. It might be an impediment list (which I don't recommend), a list of things to do, a Kaizen list, an escalation/shouganai list, a dysfunction list, a smart tasks list as result of their teams retrospectives... Some of these lists might be in MSExcel, post-its on a wall, in airtable, in trello, notepad, codi, some in sharepoint, confluence and some even in Jira, Azure DevOps, MSWord, a google drive... Those lists are about the problems they collect in the organisations they are employed in for some years, and sometimes about the proposed solutions to those problems. If you have a good memory you might even remember the scrum master mentioning this some times in the past and sharing the links. Why not - before starting the next change initiative, the next 4.0 new work transformation/transition project - have a look into this list and do some of the things they proposed. A good scrum master might even have provided some metrics with the item to look at to determine, whether this makes sense. It's not as much fun as claiming that agile doesn't work, but 2.0 does - still the results might raise some eyebrows.

IMHO 99% of all Agile Failures are due to Cultural/Paradigm mismatches and a lack of desire to change them. Also, no insult to the “Leadership Industry”, but that mostly doesn’t work either - we end up with “Leaders” who say “the correct things”, but behave according to their true/old beliefs based in the 1800’s. Finally, I don’t think the concept of Leaders works very well… People need to be Empowered and Responsible, but our society doesn’t seem to encourage that. I’m not saying I have the answers… just my personal observations cc Bob Marshall (FlowChainSensei)

Personally, I prefer the Scaled Agile DevOps Maturity Framework (https://scaledagiledevops.com/) Well done for spotting that the late majority has a leadership problem when it comes to Agile. You’ve just missed the point where companies removing ‘scrum’ and ‘Agile’ roles doesn’t indicate that Agile is dead - but the opposite. They are not going back to waterfall. Those companies have realised that the comercialisation of generic solutions doesn’t work. Yes, leadership was and still is a problem. But so is selling silver bullets. Hint: the leaders that wanted to buy magic agile dust to sprinkle on their engineering orgs to squeeze more utilisation out of their people, aren’t the kind known for self reflection and changing their own behaviour to improve culture.

It’s a bit of a straw man argument. Agile says that you don’t have Lead or Senior engineers? Agile says nothing about leadership, but it assumes that people have different seniority, as in every business, in fact. Should original Agile principles be specifically saying that you need leaders or specifically define your structure ? Why? Agile is mainly about software development practices, not about project management. The problem was never it’s principles. The problem was that business never liked the ideas of close collaboration in the first place. The controlling nature of the top branches would never allow enough trust to get rid of hard deadlines. They would keep continuing a streamline command control process. Nothing will make a business adopt Agile 5.0, 10.0 and so forth. If we just employ Scrum-like frameworks which talk about project management, then they are mute about rigorous engineering practice.

This is the Manifesto for agile software development. I didn’t hear about any manifesto for agile mortgage selling or so… Agile software development is a real thing and everything else is consultancy business. https://agilemanifesto.org/

I have one problem with Agile 2: The name. A lot of business executives will think it's just more of the same, so perhaps a rebranding would be helpful?