Agile Development, or Scrum, is a very popular topic these days. Dr. J. Davidson Frame, a long time PMI Fellow, spoke about it to the New Jersey Chapter of the PMI on 18 September 2007. Key takeways were:
1. This is really nothing new. Smaller teams have ‘huddled’ together to produce results for a long time! However, more monolithic processes, such as the waterfall method, arose out of the chaos that had spread in early days of programming. While the waterfall method provided much organization out of that chaos, it is being supplanted to a degree today by scrum, or Agile, to provide a more fluid, creative, flexible, and customer responsive framework.
2. My concern is polarization of different people into different camps. Various methodologies have arisen – Agile, CMMI, PMBOK, Waterfall – and people have built expertise and grown their careers around them. We have seen Microsoft versus Open Source camps demonstrating polarization within organizations and within the IT industry. The reality, I believe, is that both a highly structured process approach, like the PMBOK or CMMI, can live in harmony with the Agile approach, if managed properly. The need here is for strong management above these camps to understand both and get them to leverage their respective strength for maximum effectiveness. Organizations do not need to choose one or the other. They need to understand their own organizations, the technology trends, and the various methodologies. Only then can they choose “appropriate technology†and “appropriate methodologyâ€. It is all about goals, and getting from where you are now to the next level. What will get you there most effectively?
 John Reiling, PMP Project Management Training Online Lean Six Sigma Training OnlineÂ
9 responses so far ↓
1 Tanmay Vora // Sep 28, 2007 at 1:24 am
Hi John, I agree with what you have pointed toward the end of the post.
I believe that more than looking outwards for best practices and try to implement off the shelf, organizations should closely look at their business models and client types. Based on these, the best suited methodology can be adopted. It could also be a hybrid process structure which brings the best of multiple methodologies on table.
2 admin // Sep 28, 2007 at 6:57 am
Tanmay,
Thank you for your comment!
I am gald to see that perspective – that respective methodologies can co-exist in harmony.
There is another post that might interest you: Scrum and CMMI – Perfect Together?. That post shows a way that 2 very different methodologies can co-exist and complement each other.
I had a conversation with someone who was trying to work this issue. As I thought, there were strong cultural barriers between the ‘camps’.
One solution to this is to cross-pollinate. First, management must be clear on what they want to do – which methodologies are needed, why, and how they are going to mesh, like in the linked post above. Second, they can break down the cultural barriers by shifting individuals among the camps, with specific assignments, to build effective communications between the groups. For example, cross-pollinating between the CMMI and Agile camps would do it!
___________________
John Reiling, PMP
Project Management Training Online
Lean six Sigma Training Online
3 Tanmay Vora // Sep 29, 2007 at 5:10 am
Hi John, I agree. One of the important barriers in implementation of different methodologies is cultural barrier and also the past experience of people. For instance, someone who as seen high success with prototyping would certainly not buy Agile practices so easily. The key is to devise strategies and have structured counselling/training to relate the new practices with older ones and show the benefits. I also liked your idea of rotating individuals across different camps since the buy in from people comes only when they actually work with a methodology and experience/feel the benefits.
Thanks for taking this communication further. I think this conversation is worthy of a full blog post.
P.S: I read your post on Scrum and CMMI co-existence and it would be interesting to see the implications of blending these two methodologies to get the best of both the worlds.
4 admin // Oct 2, 2007 at 1:57 pm
There is also a discussion on this on gantthead, where an individual is dealing with this issue on the job, at http://www.gantthead.com/discussions/discussionsTopicContainer.cfm?ID=9606
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