Agile Business

10 years… Ten whole years of my working life dedicated to creating software through agile methods. A lot of things have changed since those first few sprints. Lots of lessons learned, (usually the hard way), plenty of experience from working with lots of different people, with difference perspectives, in different locations, with diverse cultures and in unique companies. As I went through the highs and lows of agile adoption I wrote a small but detailed blog along the way. These ‘epistles’ were usually written when I had considerable motivation to tell the story – when on a high from success, or a low from learning things the hard way. These blogs became a vehicle to vent frustration or expound virtues of some new insight or shift in mind-set. Over these first weeks of 2013, I’m going to take some time to review these blogs, and retrospectively comment, amend and critique the thinking at the time, against the years of experience that have followed. Maybe I’ll learn something ne...

If, like me you seek insights into how to really create "Agile" businesses, I'm afraid there's a mountain of hype, miscommunication and misunderstanding to wade through. "Agile" has over the last 2 years become the latest "fad" in business circles (certainly I.T. circles) and so of course, every Tom, Dick and Harry is jumping on the bandwagon trying to make a "buck!" I attended a Scrum Gathering in the States about 2 years ago when the issue of how to rapidly implement Agile across large organisations was a key topic. The truth is, that as with anything in life, it takes time, alot of time, to get something worth having! Toyota are quoted as saying it takes 12 years for a corporation to become lean, and I believe them. "Agile" with a capital A, is not just about adopting a methodology or some SOA or web services architecture; Agile is about shifting executive, middle management and "coal-face" employee mindsets from he...