I’m doing a presentation on a seminar in Jönköping on the topic of “Agile in a Larger Context”. I will focus on the values of agile, the things that are perceived as impossible to handle in an agile way, particular in larger organisations doing complex systems development, and how such a transition can be made anyway.
Anders Olofsson from Combitech is the organizer and Anders Hallqvist from DNV will be presenting on Agile and CMMI. 48 persons registered so far.
Update: around 60 persons finally attended. We started the seminar with the Ball Point Game with four teams of around 15 people. It was much appreciated. Here are my slides: Agile i ett större sammanhang 2009-10-21.
Hi Thomas!
Sounds like an excellent but difficult topic. Could you summarize a little bit what you talked about? Was it well received?
Yes, Joakim, it is kind of a difficult topic. There are few good examples, and trying Agile in most large organizations will reveal whole barrels of other problems in the organization, like immature management, lack of common visions, strong beliefs in command and control, treating individuals as replaceable resources and getting things done by pushing. Fortunately there are ways to proceed with an Agile transformation anyway, at least in my mind and to my experience.
This was the first time I collected my thoughts on this topic and my main point was to make the participants feel confident that there are solutions to the perceived problems starting on a road to Agile. If the responses to the participant survey is any indication, at least I succeeded to some degree. But, of course there are always people hard to convince unless you have hard evidence.
I will update the post with the slides from the talk, and probably do a blog for some of the main points.