Going Beyond Remote Agile: Are You Ready For Your Next Change?
From the Disciplined Agile Applied Blog
by Scott Ambler
This blog explores pragmatic agile and lean strategies for enterprise-class contexts.
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I recently wrote an article for PMI's ManageIndia magazine entitled Going Beyond Remote Agile: Are You Ready For Your Next Change? In the article I argue that coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a “black swan event” that has forced most organizations to scramble to figure out how to do their work remotely. Many agile teams are struggling to work remotely, this being particularly tough for some agilists who had mistakenly convinced themselves that they needed to be co-located to be agile. Most teams now are well on the way to adopting common solutions to this challenge.
But what about next time? I work through five important points to lead you to organize your work smoothly and what you can do the next time you need to identify a new way of working (WoW):
- Recognize that remote agile isn't new. Others have already dealt with the challenges that you face.
- Geographic distribution is only one of several scaling factors that you face. You may need to address other, even harder, challenges in the future.
- Choice is good. If you know what options are available to you, it's easier to choose your WoW to meet the context that you face.
- You don't need to work everything out on your own. The Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit provides consumable, proven, agnostic, and pragmatic options.
- We need to do better than "fail fast." You can fail a lot less often with a bit of help that we call guided continuous improvement (GCI).
We live in interesting times. The article Going Beyond Remote Agile: Are You Ready For Your Next Change? goes into detail and should provide valuable insights. You can download the full issue of PMI's ManageIndia April 2020 as a pdf.
Posted on: April 14, 2020 08:36 AM |
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Comments (8)
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Thanks Scott - I'd agree with all five of your points, but not necessarily that COVID-19 is a black swan. A true black swan should be close to an unknown-unknown, and yet, alarm bells had rung as far back as 2007 about the "wet markets" in Wuhan as a potential pandemic time bomb. Also, one would have thought that SARS, MERS and other near pandemics would have made governments more prepared for this.
Scott Ambler
Consulting Methodologist| Ambysoft Inc.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Hopefully we'll learn from this one....
Thanks for sharing, very interesting article.
Jonathan Winstead
Project Manager/Principal Systems Engineer| Collins Aerospace
Raleigh, Nc, United States
Thanks for the reference to the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit. This is a useful resource. I agree that COVID-19 presents us with a unique opportunity to look at new way of working (WOW) that we have been deferring for so long as we are always "busy". Thanks for the introduction to this concept and link to your article that expounds on that topic.
Drew Craig
Sr. Agile & Product Coach| Vanguard
Philadelphia, Pa, United States
Thank you, Scott. Certainly, good points. While remote [agile] working is nothing new, organizations are seemingly unprepared with a shortage of properly vetted tools for connecting teams and enabling seamless efforts.
Also, agree with Kiron. I think I read the same publication from 2007 - amazing indeed.
Scott Ambler
Consulting Methodologist| Ambysoft Inc.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Andrew and Kiron, I see your point but am not moved by it. Whenever something bad happens we can alway look back and find a Cassandra who warned us of this very thing. Of course there are thousands of other Cassandras warning us of different, and equally unlikely things, but they're still being ignored because their number hasn't hit yet on the roulette wheel of disasters.
I had the pleasure of working with an epidemiology startup before joining PMI. One of the things that I learned while working there, which I had a bit of an inkling of already but had no idea as to the extent of it, was that there is a long list of potential sources for new viruses. The long list of sources of existing viruses was scary enough. All you need to do is mix a few exotic species together near some hungry people and you've got an opportunity for a new virus. Wuhan is only one of many places where we have that happening.
Eating our fellow primates is also a reasonably bad idea too. And then there's always the opportunity for a lab-grown bug, but let's not go there. The real mess will start when ancient bugs are released from the melting permafrost, and I suspect that will catch us by surprise too.
Pierre E. Neis
Consultant & Executive Coach | Creator of AO Method| Menschgeist GmbH
Pfäffikon Zh, Switzerland
In fact, Agile is designed for Black Swans. It is designed to prevent VUCA issues. It is designed for responsiveness.
COVID-19 created a weird situation and we all thought that it will be a mess. Fact, it doesn't. We saw people working from home being more productive, more efficient.
How come? Distance doesn't avoid closeness. The face-to-face conversation promoted by the Agile Manifesto has to understood from an alignment, collaboration and alignment perspective.
Great job, And nice to be improved.more.
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