Andy Hunt recently posted a great piece: Stage 0: Not Ready For Agile. He was all set to give a talk at a company until, well, someone discovered he was coming. Turns out the manager that contacted Andy hadn’t followed the non-existent process and instead of congratulating him or her on bringing in a well known speaker, they decided it’d be better if it could never happen again.
As stunned as I was by this, I’m not surprised. Talk is cheap - it’s easy to say you want to be (or are) agile but the proof is in the pudding. You can say you value collaboration but when there are three levels of indirection between developers and end users, that statement echos hollow.
Culture plays a huge role in how we build software; Andy lists several traits that indicate you might not quite be up to the challenge of agile. Some are fixed more readily then others but if your culture won’t support it, you’ve got your work cut out for you. Unfortunately, cultural issues don’t respond to technical solutions as Reg Braithwaite says so well with this quote:
“Cultural problems cannot be solved with technology. If you are an advocate for change, ask yourself what sort of cultural change is needed, not what sort of technical problems need to be solved.”
Changing culture is hard, but for many organizations, it’s the critical first step towards better software.
