Here is Patric Wilson-Welsh's position paper in Word format, including images.
Here is the text of it:
Getting Pragmatic about Agility for Pragmatists
Preventing the Road Kill from Being Painted Yellow, Somehow
Agile Transition: the Good Old Days
Early agile adoptions concentrated on the early part of Geoffrey Moore’s famous curve from Crossing the Chasm:
( missing: image of Moore's diagram )
The population of agile coaches and mentors came, themselves, from the Enthusiasts sector, and developed most of their agile transition chops assisting the Visionaries adopt agility.
This is, of course, a heinous overimplification, but bear with me.
Some of the patterns we saw in early agile transition involved creating teams full of Enthusiasts and Visionaries: continuous learners, natural leaders, good communicators, courageous experimentors. As much difficulty as we encountered as coaches, much of our success derived from our leverage of these kinds of folks. Folks fundamentally like us.
Client staff who were uncomfortable with such transitions could easily flee agile teams to more conservative teams, companies, and practices.
The Jig is Up
Now, for awhile, we have indeed been crossing the chasm, and we have discovered that the tools and approaches we honed among lots of Enthusiasts and Visionaries are not working as well as we would like with the Pragmatists, and are working quite poorly with the Conservatives. The skeptics, meanwhile, are in full revolt (e.g., “Post-Agilismâ€).
Here are the kinds of questions that occupy me as an agile coach, mentor, and trainer in 2008:
The biggest challenge to agility for Pragmatists appears to me to be the basic silo orientation, the “not my job†mentality, that pervades large bureacracies (where most of the Pragmatists and Conservatives work).
When I think of “That’s not my job,†I think of this photograph, and its equivalent software development situation (I’m thinking about exploding production deployments in particular):
( missing: image of roadkill, painted yello on middle of road )
The upshot, of course, is that whoever had the job of painting the road did not believe that it was their job to stop the truck, get down, and remove the dead possum first.
Here is the text of it:
Getting Pragmatic about Agility for Pragmatists
Preventing the Road Kill from Being Painted Yellow, Somehow
Agile Transition: the Good Old Days
Early agile adoptions concentrated on the early part of Geoffrey Moore’s famous curve from Crossing the Chasm:
( missing: image of Moore's diagram )
The population of agile coaches and mentors came, themselves, from the Enthusiasts sector, and developed most of their agile transition chops assisting the Visionaries adopt agility.
This is, of course, a heinous overimplification, but bear with me.
Some of the patterns we saw in early agile transition involved creating teams full of Enthusiasts and Visionaries: continuous learners, natural leaders, good communicators, courageous experimentors. As much difficulty as we encountered as coaches, much of our success derived from our leverage of these kinds of folks. Folks fundamentally like us.
Client staff who were uncomfortable with such transitions could easily flee agile teams to more conservative teams, companies, and practices.
The Jig is Up
Now, for awhile, we have indeed been crossing the chasm, and we have discovered that the tools and approaches we honed among lots of Enthusiasts and Visionaries are not working as well as we would like with the Pragmatists, and are working quite poorly with the Conservatives. The skeptics, meanwhile, are in full revolt (e.g., “Post-Agilismâ€).
Here are the kinds of questions that occupy me as an agile coach, mentor, and trainer in 2008:
- How do I keep from leaving the Pragmatists behind? How do I allay their fears? How do I get traction quickly?
- How do I make headway at all in large insurance companies or auto companies beset with indescribable layers of bureaucracy, FUD, and “that ain’t my job†mentality?
- How do I quickly help a group of procedural, VB6 programmers begin to understand the power of OO, unit testing, Refactoring, Patterns, dependency injection, mocks, etc? How do I get traction with FUD-intensive, vocational cubicle-dwellers? What percentage of natural leaders and visionaries must I have among them?
- How do I get QA involved, enfranchised, coopeted, on-board? How do I prevent them from spinning out gobs of fear-based stories about all the unplanned-for scenarios?
- What kinds of new teaching tools and pedagogical approaches might get better traction with the Pragmatists?
The biggest challenge to agility for Pragmatists appears to me to be the basic silo orientation, the “not my job†mentality, that pervades large bureacracies (where most of the Pragmatists and Conservatives work).
When I think of “That’s not my job,†I think of this photograph, and its equivalent software development situation (I’m thinking about exploding production deployments in particular):
( missing: image of roadkill, painted yello on middle of road )
The upshot, of course, is that whoever had the job of painting the road did not believe that it was their job to stop the truck, get down, and remove the dead possum first.