Please join us this Thursday, November 3rd at The Linkery in North Park
for a talk by Woody Zuill. The meeting will start at 6:30pm but you are
welcome to arrive earlier for a beer and a chat. Here are directions:
http://bit.ly/cRv21j
"Agile Success - why not me too?"
A lot of software projects have disappointing results: missed deadlines,
buggy software, escalating costs, feature cuts, loss of customers, etc.
The problems that cause these results plague a lot of us.
When the process they follow is not giving the results they need some
project or product managers (or team leads, developers, or whoever)
choose to attempt an Agile approach, yet they are frustrated as they
continue to get the same bad results as before. They struggle with the
same old problems - and typically have introduced some new ones.
My observation: People are trying to solve the wrong problem(s).
Typically they are either trying to "solve" symptoms and not a real
problem, or they have a mistaken understanding of what is important.
This leads to waste trying to solve irrelevant or non-existent problems.
Until this is addressed, the process we follow isn’t the critical issue
- unless we can find a process or set of guidelines that will help us
expose and deal with real problems. We need a way to ruthlessly track
down and fix our misconceptions, and we need to be good at this.
My goal is to help us see that "We have met the enemy, and he is US" -
[Pogo, 1971, Walt Kelly]. I probably won’t be able to do that, but you
gotta have goals don’t you?... or do you?
We’ll start this session with a quick information gathering exercise
where we’ll each suggest a problem we’re having. We’ll pick a few of
them as a starting point and see if we can move toward a better
understanding of the real problems that need our attention.
About Woody Zuill:
Woody Zuill is a software developer, development team manager, and Agile
expert. He has had numerous successes and plenty of failures using an
Agile based approach to solve real problems in software development
efforts. He continues to learn from his mistakes.
http://agilesandiego.org
http://zuill.us/WoodyZuill/
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