Read My Lips: Agile Isn’t a Speed Play

Bob Galen is the President and Principal Consultant of RGCG, L.L.C. a Cary, N.C.-based agile methods coaching & training consultancy. He is a deeply experienced Agile & Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) who is active in the agile community and regularly writes & teaches on all topics related to the agile methods. Bob has written two agile related books: Scrum Product Ownership, a definitive work surrounding agile product ownership, and Agile Reflections, which is focused toward mature agile patterns. He can be reached at [email protected] and join his mailing list at http://eepurl.com/IAxTD.

  Agile  

As a coach, I’m getting truly tired of talking to managers and leaders whose sole motivation in adopting agile methods is…

Increased capacity to go faster!

For example, I recently ran into a few leaders of one company at a conference. They came to learn a little bit more about “agile,” but they’d already made the decision to adopt it within one of their key divisions.

Not only had they decided to adopt it, but they’d already decided that agile would give them a boost in capacity--so they reduced the development teams in the division by 50%. The thought was: “Agile will give us a force multiplier of at least two times our capacity, so we can redirect those resources (people) to other initiatives.”

In fact, they were incredibly proud of how “conservative” they were in their plans, thinking that more cuts would soon be possible.

Speechless
If you know me at all, you know that I’m rarely without words. But in this particular case I was literally speechless. I tried to explain to them that agile wasn’t necessarily a “speed play,” and it certainly wouldn’t instantaneously give them a double productivity boost. But my words fell on deaf ears as they’d already gone “all in” with this strategy. I left feeling a bit sad for them and their teams.

What sort of &…

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