While at Agile 2007, I attended a discovery session led by Pete Behrens, of Agile Executive Blog. Pete had assembled 3 of his clients who had all taken their teams through enterprise level transitions to an agile approach to software development and project management, along with a group of perhaps 60 conference attendees. We sat in small circles of 6 or so folks per group. The session was divided in to talks by each of Pete's clients, some summarization from Pete himself, and group chats followed by some "show and tell" to the wider room.

My big take-away from the session was that several of the folks in my small group and at least one of the main presenters, gave a summary of their transition to agile that went something like this...

One of our execs met some guy sitting in First Class, who persuaded him that if we weren't agile we were being left behind. So when he got back from his trip, he sought me out as a known change agent and asked me to lead a transition to agile development. So I assembled a small team and we learned all their was to know about agile. [Perhaps we hired a consultant to help us.] Then we made a plan of how to take our teams from the traditional waterfall style development method we'd been using to an agile/Scrum approach. Over the next 9 months we executed on that plan, and gradually we saw all the agile practices adopted across all of our teams. We completed that process 3 months ago and now we are agile!

Does anything strike you as ironic about this?

The way to enterprise agility was to make a big plan up front, based on a top-down, management led initiative, and to command and control the team to change to an agile style of working. Then to execute against the plan, and when every task on the plan was completed to declare that the change was done!

As I stated in my previous post, I'd been there before and struggled to achieve both scale and longevity with the changes. My fear with many of the enterprise scale transitions now taking place is that they will suffer the same fate. When the management that led the change is gone, the teams will gradually atrophy back to a traditional way of working. Unless a fundamental change in the organizational culture is achieved and the new culture is institutionalized from top to bottom in the organization, then I fear that the benefits of agility - even they are recognized as hyper-productivity in some teams - will be short-lived. An agile may get labeled as just another management fad. [Check out Sanjiv Augustine answering the 5Qs at PM Boulevard and his scenario #2 that Agile may indeed be just the management "fad of the year."] Technorati tag: Agile, Software+Engineering, David+Anderson, Pete+Behrens, Sanjiv+Augustine