It’s that time of year again where we exit the current year and enter the new. As is fashionable for a blog on Agile, I’d like to do an end of year retrospective. First and foremost, I’d like mention that I have blogged here for my first full year and appreciate the opportunity to write about project management “Agility and Project Leadership” as well as being thankful for all the feedback and readership from this excellent PM portal site.
Some time ago I posted about the commodification of the IT project manager both on this 
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Retrospective on 2012 and look into 2013
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Some of the most popular topics have been around the migration of Agile outside of software development, and for me the most visible example was the build out of the Wikispeed race car using Agile practices, methods and principles from top to bottom. I first wrote about it in a blog as well as an in depth article. Other interesting and popular topics included the recent posting on the increasing popularity as well as the increasing commercialization (or commodification) of Scrum. Like it or not, Scrum’s explosive growth as well as global popularity and adoption has made Agile a household name in the project management field. PMI is now competing with their own Agile certification. Unless you lived under a rock, Agile is gaining serious traction and one only has to view the most recent and just released PMBOK v5.0 to see that there is much more Agile-isms incorporated in this version than last. What this indicates is that there will be more desire and need to create a bridge for those who are still practicing traditional project management to integrate more Agile with it. In many instances it will not be by choice and will cut across much more diverse industries than just software development. It will take more skill, knowledge and know how to bridge this gap and for 2013 my goal with this blog and future articles is to write about and hopefully provide guidance on this. For I am actively working in an environment where this bridge needs to occur, so I am writing from the perspective of an actual practitioner in the field so you’ll know it’s for real. With that I look forward to future conversations with all you highly skilled and professional Agile project professionals and leaders and may 2013 be even more fruitful than 2012! Happy new years! |
Posted on: December 31, 2012 01:38 PM
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The explosive growth of the Scrum franchise
| So as a follow up to my post on the McDonaldization of Scrum, some numbers I've just ran across seem to give credence to my idea that Scrum is becoming quite the franchise. According to a post by Jeff Sutherland, co-founder of Scrum, he points out the explosive growth of Scrum job postings recently: There are 451,176 Scrum job openings in the United States this morning and these new jobs are increasing at a rate of about 10,000 per month. After reading Waterfall to Agile, you might take a look at the Power of Scrum, attend a Certified Scrum Master training, and start interviewing for an agile position. Many people have told me it has changed their lives dramatically for the better. This graph from Google insight, which captures the growth of search terms seems to indicate a geometric growth rate for Scrum since its inception back in 2001:
Just for kicks, here’s the growth of McDonald’s search terms from Google:
Striking how parallel the growth graph is! This can indicate that it is a great time to jump on the top of this growth curve and "buy" into the Scrum franchise, or may indicate for those that are looking for the "next great thing" that it may have peaked. But the same was said for McDonalds, especially when Subway surpassed them with the number of franchise locations, but they are still chugging along. Food for thought, literally! :) |
Posted on: December 21, 2012 12:11 PM
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Is Scrum becoming the McDonalds of Agile? Good or bad?
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This will even effect the new kid on the block, namely Agile project management. I found this interesting post from the Agile @ Adobe blog posted by Peter Green, in which he argues that Scrum is becoming the “Model-T” of Agile:
I started wondering: “Is scrum too much of a sacred cow to evolve?” I’m not sure the answer to that question, but while thinking about it, the idea came to me that Scrum is not a sacred cow as much as it is the Model-T of agile.
Ford didn’t invent the automobile, that honor goes to Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, Gottlieb Daimler, Carl Benz, or Wilhelm Maybach, depending on the book you’re reading. What Ford did was figure out a way to mass produce the automobile and sell it to the public at an affordable price such that it became an integral part of the lives of nearly everyone on the planet today.
Similarly, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber didn’t invent agile. The ideas of agile go back to at least the 1950s and probably before that, and are part of a family of new approaches to doing business that also includes movements like Lean, Theory of Constraints, and Six Sigma in manufacturing, Leadership Agility and Radical Management in management theory, and Lean Startup and Innovation Games for learning about customer needs. What Jeff and Ken did was figure out a way to mass produce Agile and sell it to the software industry in a way that has put agile on the map all the way up the C level of nearly every organization where software is important. Gartner famously predicted that by this 2012, 80% of software development will be done with an agile approach. The focusing of agile principles into a broadly applicable framework like scrum was a major innovation, just as the development of the Model-T assembly line was a major innovation in manufacturing
I have to agree with much of this assessment, and the irony is not lost on me that he is comparing Scrum’s evolution in terms of the Model-T assembly line process. Much of Agile’s initiative was a reaction to the top down, waterfall cum assembly line like process of traditional project management, that while innovative and disruptive from its inception, really is now common place and I have to say, becoming a commodity.
With the mass adoption and churning out of Scrum certifications, which even now has been incorporated into the repertoire of PMI’s certification curricula after initially ignoring the movement, it has now become quite the McDonalds of Agile movements.
So I think we can now ask the question posed by Peter Green:
The Ford assembly line was the exact innovation needed in its day. It persisted as the primary innovation in the auto industry until the 1970s when companies like Toyota evolved a newer approach that was more fit to customer’s evolving needs and provided higher quality products. It took decades for Ford to adopt similar approaches to catch up to Toyota. The question for me is this: at 20 years old, will Scrum see the need to evolve, and if so, how?
What will be the next evolution or revolution of Agile?
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Posted on: December 15, 2012 11:25 AM
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The KCP: Kanban Certified Professional
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Here’s a description of the certification from the LKU site:
Lean-Kanban University (LKU) announces the launch of a professional designation for people coaching Kanban: Kanban Coaching Professional, or KCP. The Kanban Coaching Professional program has been established in response to demand from the community. Since the successful launch of the Lean-Kanban University Accredited Kanban Training program in early 2012, many prominent members of the Kanban community have expressed a desire to be recognized with a professional designation for their coaching, consulting, or managerial contributions. It was felt that Lean-Kanban University should do more than just recognize those offering formal Kanban training…
Candidates for the KCP designation must have completed a 3-day Advanced Kanban Masterclass, developed field experience working with Kanban in one or more organizations, and must submit to a peer review process. The advisory board will appoint a review panel to consider each application.
The Kanban Coaching Professional designation indicates that an individual is a member of the Lean-Kanban University Kanban Coaching Professional program. An annual membership fee will be levied. To maintain their status, KCP’s will be expected to play an active role in the Kanban community. Specific requirements will be advised via the Advisory Board from time to time.
Pawel Brodzinski, a well known blogger on software project management who has expressed an antipathy towards most PM certifications, felt compelled to obtain the certification and expresses his rationale for obtaining it:
As Kanban gets more and more popular, I see more people jumping on this bandwagon, offering training, coaching and what have you. The problem is that sometimes I know these people and I’m rather scared that they are teaching Kanban.
Not that I want to forbid anyone to teach Kanban, but I believe we arrived to the point where we need a distinction. The distinction between people who invest their time to keep in touch with the community, attend events, share experience, engage discussions, etc. and those who just add a Kanban course to their wide training portfolio because, well, people want to buy this crap.
This is exactly why I decided to get enrolled in the KCP program. For this very distinction.
I believe that, at least for now, it differentiates people who you’d like to hire to help you with Kanban from those who you can’t really tell anything about. This is where I see the biggest value of KCP. I really do hope it will stay this way.
I can understand this rationale, for as a similar person who writes about, coaches, consults and trains on topics related to project management I’m always trying to stay on top of these things to add some legitimacy to my background. And of course, I’m unashamedly doing this to increase my profile which increases my ability to earn more by monetizing my services.
If this is something you are looking to pursue in depth, it might be worthwhile to look into this as it is so new and is just on the cusp of the Kanban hype bandwagon that has dawn upon us in the project management world.
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Posted on: December 01, 2012 04:20 PM
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Shipping software at 20% completion
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 I just read this very interesting article from The Economist about two very innovative game companies from Japan called DeNA, which has become famous for an addictive game called “Blood Brothers” and its rival GREE. They’re both mobile game companies that allow you to download their game to your smartphone or tablet for free, but charges for add-ons that increase your chances of winning.
Combined they have posted revenues that has already exceeded Facebook and unlike the game company Zynga famous for Facebook games such as Farmville, are turning serious profits (DeNA made 20.4 billion yuan last quarter which will exceed all of Nitento’s yearly profits this year alone).
Most interesting for us as Agile project leaders is their model of production deployment:
The secret of their success, they say, is their head start in Japan thanks to fast mobile-phone networks that made it easy to play games while commuting, or during spare moments. By studying their customers, they learned a lot. DeNA, for example, found that the average user played for seven minutes, five times a day. So casual gamers need shorter, punchier games than do hard-core gamers who goggle at big screens for hours at a time...
DeNA first puts out its games on browsers rather than applications, which allows for “tweaking and tuning” in real time, says Mr Moriyasu. A Japanese game may be only 20% completed when it is made available to gamers. Its developers believe this enables them to finesse it, so that it stays popular for longer.
So going by Agile standards, they probably run a iteration or two when the game is at a “potentially shippable product” state then deploy and constantly tweak the game based on tracking and customer feedback all the while generating revenue from add-ons that allow customers to continue on with the game.
It has become so addictive that Japanese regulators are scrutinizing practices such as users being allowed to collect “randomly generated tokens that the regulator likened to a slot machine.”
In any event, this example shows how the mobile gaming industry which is growing by leaps and bounds is pushing the envelope with respect to Agile practices and methods.
The secret of their success, they say, is their head start in Japan thanks to fast mobile-phone networks that made it easy to play games while commuting, or during spare moments. By studying their customers, they learned a lot. DeNA, for example, found that the average user played for seven minutes, five times a day. So casual gamers need shorter, punchier games than do hard-core gamers who goggle at big screens for hours at a time...
DeNA first puts out its games on browsers rather than applications, which allows for “tweaking and tuning” in real time, says Mr Moriyasu. A Japanese game may be only 20% completed when it is made available to gamers. Its developers believe this enables them to finesse it, so that it stays popular for longer.
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Posted on: November 23, 2012 02:32 PM
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