Suggestions please.
I few weeks ago I received a request to create and deliver an “Advanced Agile” training course for a Scandinavian client. My first reaction was: that is more of a consulting or coaching assignment. But when I thought it through and considered the kind of material I covered in my own “Agile Foundations” course, and the introductory courses I know from other people the more I realized how much more there was I could cover.
I’m not most of the way through creating the course and I’ll deliver it in a couple of week. I’ll report back on what I put in and what people thing.
In the meantime, I was wondering: what do readers of this blog consider Advanced Agile?
Suggestions please, on this blog or e-mail me and I’ll summarize them.
Allan,
ReplyDeleteHaving worked with EnergizedWork (winners of this year's Gordon Pask Awards) for a couple of years and experienced their No Compromise approach to Agile methods, I concluded my time with them feeling that if I ever attained that intensity of Agile again, I would be very very lucky indeed. In fact, my easiest alternative is to run a team aspiring to the following methods.
We used Scrum (insofar as it gave us a daily cycles and retrospectives), full time pair programming which demanded unavoidably up-front TDD (and on unit, functional levels), constant feedback from QA and the customer during development, all of which was deeply rooted in self organisation, responsibility, accountability and respect.
Given that's already quite advanced - compared to many places - Simon and Gus were working on the throughput accounting side of the equation (from Lean, Poppendieck, Anderson et al) - since after all the team was perfectly capable of running itself.
Taking that model, wiring in the metrics (a la Eric Ries) so you get to a place similar to Facebook or Flickr, where they can split test and analyze new features released in the wild with real-time measurment/metrics against KPIs per feature would be - as far as I can see - a pretty impressive nadir of such an Agile effort.
Agility is nothing if it never evolves to reflect on itself and revise itself.
Its a great question though and I'm very curious to hear what others perceive / have experienced by way of Advanced Agile.