The Transformation Blog

My last blog article incited a riot among the Scrum purists.. Well, maybe not a riot, but it certainly invoked emotions and passions which I love... but what I don't love is how the Scrum faithful are increasingly resistant to critical thought and debate... so let me attempt to clarify my motives and objective in writing my last article..

As we work with clients who are moving up the Agile maturity curve there is increasing interest in the subject of Lean management frameworks for complementing Agile practices.  Because the two value systems and supporting management techniques share so much in common, it’s often helpful to compare and contrast the two in order to better understand how they fit together.

While most of the Agile community is comfortable promoting Agile and Scrum practices as relatively simple and straight forward, they overlook the fact that in many organizations these new “required” practices are anything but simple to implement.  The reality is that there are devilish details to concern yourself with when nurturing Agile process, planning, engineering and organizational change that you wont read or hear about from those promoting “Agile by the book”.

The fine folks over at Forrester know a good trend when they see one,  and CIO Magazine, not to be left out of the party is using Forrester’s latest report on Agile adoption to publish their own commentary (Agile Goes Mainstream) on why this is such wonderful news.  With Forrester and CIO Magazine essentially declaring victory over software and product development practices long ago proven ineffective in the modern world (waterfall, ad-hoc, etc.) and in it’s place

The drum beat around Bottom-Up values and practices has become so widespread that I now routinely find my new prospective clients designing entire organizational transition plans based on an absolute belief that Top-Down is “bad” and Bottom-Up is “good”.  As the saying goes, be careful what you ask for…