I just got an email from a company called agile42 that I talked with at Mile High Agile. I was really just looking for a good place to save this for my own use, but figerd that agile42 wouldn't mind if I gave them some free advertising by sharing it here.
Q: How can I make my company realize that they are NOT agile when they say they are?
agile42 Insight:
This is a great question and one we often get from the community. If a company is saying "We're all good, we're agile now!", it likely means they're looking at it as a binary measure - that they simply areor are not agile. In this case, convincing someone that they are not something they claim to beis difficult, because it feels like failure. Instead, we prefer to think of it like a spectrum. Some might think of it as a journey and most organizations are somewhere between "We need to get started" and "We've reached our destination".
One way to have this conversation at any level of the organization is to have people reflect on the 12 Agile Principles and then rank them in order of how strongly they are living them.
Q: How can I make my company realize that they are NOT agile when they say they are?
agile42 Insight:
This is a great question and one we often get from the community. If a company is saying "We're all good, we're agile now!", it likely means they're looking at it as a binary measure - that they simply areor are not agile. In this case, convincing someone that they are not something they claim to beis difficult, because it feels like failure. Instead, we prefer to think of it like a spectrum. Some might think of it as a journey and most organizations are somewhere between "We need to get started" and "We've reached our destination".
One way to have this conversation at any level of the organization is to have people reflect on the 12 Agile Principles and then rank them in order of how strongly they are living them.
- First, select the top 3 strongest and bottom 3 weakest.
- Next, go through the 3 strongest principles and identify two or three concrete things the organization does that makes them good at those principles.
- Finally, go through the weakest 3 (opportunities for improvement if you'd like a less negative connotation). Identify two or three concrete things that might improve these principles.
- Through this method, you get a list of improvements that either shore up weak spots or double down on strengths - either way, they all make your company more agile!
