What's in a name?

[Sitting is Starbucks in Leeds - up here to run an Introduction to Agile Course]

Is your company Agile? Yes, I thought it would be. I don't think I've talked to anyone who didn't claim that their company was. Of course, further questioning would often reveal that they weren't actually doing fixed-length iterative development, weren't actually planning in terms of stories or any of the other things in the Nokia test. It took me a long time to realise why I wasn't getting an honest answer: no one is ever going to say that they're not agile. How likely is this?

Q: Is your company Agile?
A: No, not us, we're lethargic and arthritic.

The word "agile" perhaps betrays the movements American roots. It has lots of positive connotations: energy, intelligence, responsiveness. But (perhaps this betrays my British roots) this means that admitting you're not agile has all the opposite connotations: lethargy, stupidity, unresponsiveness. Nobody's going to admit to that - even if it's actually how they feel. And lets be honest, we all feel like that some of the time.

Trying to make people feel bad about themselves before you try to sell them something guaranteed to make them feel good is a standard sales technique. Whether you're selling soap powder of salvation it can be very effective.

We believe that (almost) all our potential customers are very clever people. They are doing a pretty good job with the tools that they have at their disposal. They don't need salvation - they need some new techniques. What we try to do is give them better tools, not software tools, not technological tools, but conceptual tools that allow them to do a better job.

Best feet forward?

Please don't anyone take this as advice of road safety. It's just an exercise.

Push your chair back from the computer. Just relax. Imagine that you're driving along in your car down a very familiar stretch of road. A journey that you've done lots and lots of times. Yes, that's it, mime holding the steering wheel. You can't close your eyes, because then you won't be able to read this, but in your mind's eye, imagine what you can see. Familiar roads, familiar corners, and junctions. Then suddenly, something jumps out in front of you. It's a toddler, chasing a ball. Stop! Stop! You have to STOP!

If you're used to driving a manual transmission car you probably wanted to stamp both feet straight out in front of you. One on the brake. One on the clutch. When we want to stop a car in a hurry that's our instinctive reaction. We tend not to think about it, there isn't time. But is it the best?

If the road conditions are good, it's probably the best, most effective strategy, but what if the road conditions aren't good? What if it's raining? What if it's snowing what if there's an inch of ice on the road? If the road's slippery, it's best to pump the brakes. But what do you do if you thump both feet to the floor and you start to skid? Apparently, you're supposed to turn into the skid to regain control even though this feels like exactly the wrong thing to do. People can learn to drive in wet and icy conditions, they can learn to resist their first instincts, pump the brakes and turn into the skids but it takes time and practice, rarely do people spontaneously do the right thing.

Someone was asking me yesterday why so many projects use a waterfall approach rather than an agile one. I think it's for similar reasons. In industrial societies waterfall methods are deep down in our brains. We just assume that the way that anything complicated gets done is by putting together a long, complicate plan and then trying to deliver on it. No matter how many times the result of this is the project management equivalent of skidding into a ditch, because this is our hard-wired, instinctive approach, we carry on doing it.

Agile is the project management equivalent of pumping the brakes and steering into the skids.

Hate to blow our own trumpet but...

Just found this entry on twitter. Very nice to know that we're appreciated.