Bringing Simplicity Back to Agile

If your company is not agile but considering going that route, stop! If your company has adopted agile and is struggling, stop! I'm a huge fan of agile and it pains me to see companies get bogged down with what agile has become instead of what it is. I can help you bring the simplicity back to agile.

Your managers might be so busy asking whether they can be agile that they forget to ask whether they should be agile. Key red flags are saying things like "we can develop faster," "we need to control development costs," or "we need to get the entire company on agile." If those are the comments dominating your company's discussions about going agile, your management has been asking the wrong questions.

I can help you with that. If you've read the now-infamous The End of Agile article in Forbes, you may even be more confused. While the article raised some good points, it was largely talking about the confusion that agile has become rather than what agile actually is. A key quote from the article lays this bare:

The core principle was simple - you didn't really need large groups of people working on software projects to get them done. If anything, beyond a certain point extra people just added to the communication impedance and slowed a project down.

But this is wrong. The "core principle" of agile isn't about small teams; that's a side-effect. Agile isn't about developing faster; that's a side effect. If you focus on the symptoms rather than the cause, you get it all wrong. It's like noticing your software is slow and trying to cache everything when all you need is to tune your database.

What I Can Provide

• Return agile to its original simplicity
• Understand when to choose agile, lean, and structured project management
• Align your management and development staff to focus on the same goals
• A hiring process proven to improve your chances of hiring awesome employees

What You Will Get

• A clear understanding of when you do and do not need agile
• Management and developers working together instead of at cross-purposes
• Returning your focus to productivity instead of process
• Project management that grows as you need it, not before

I have done this as in-house training and as an in-house consultant. Send me a message on LinkedIn if you'd like to discuss this more or drop me an email at [email protected]. Contrary to what many agile trainers will tell you, the core of this is simple enough that it can fit into a single day-long training session. However, deeper work is often needed if your company has no significant agile experience.

For background on whether or not you need agile, here's a talk I gave about this in Romania.

And let me close with a quote from one of our clients:

Curtis "Ovid" Poe has a unique and realistic perspective on hiring, agile management, and motivation that is refreshing in a world of project management dogma. Changes that can help you make better hires and make better use of the staff you have. Poe brings a point of view that keeps a room of developers, scrum masters, product owners, managers, and executives interested and enlightened.