RE: If Agile is So Good, Why Isn't Everyone Doing It?

InfoQ asks "If Agile is So Good, Why Isn't Everyone Doing it?"...

Its a well know fact that most people don't like change. This is why we have change management consultants! However this doesn't really explain why people seems to resist more to agility than when we impose a heavyweight process upon them.

When we add to an existing process, people will complain about having to do more stuff. But they don't feel threatened by the new tasks they have to do. If the process becomes more heavyweight, they will just ask their manager to hire someone and after asking again and again, somebody will be hired to take the load. Manager just love this way of doing things. They can ask for more budget (which they'll get after asking a few times) and they ends up managing more money and more people. The manager just got closer to his nirvana.

Now, when we are talking about Agile Software Development, we are not talking about more, but we are talking about less. Because agility is about being more efficient, we need less people, less time and less budget to achieve the same result. If we think rationally, then we feel good about this. However most people don't think rationally. Because we have a smaller and multi-disciplinary team, some people will fear to loose their job because there is less work. Some people will fear that they'll be less relevant. Some will not want to take new roles or change their existing one. Managers will fear that their budget or workforce will be lowered...

But it does not have to be this way... Being more efficient is not about firing employee or decreasing budget! It's about doing more with the same workforce and budget. It's about bringing more quality. It's about having more fun doing what we do.

On a final note... More heavyweight process mean more finger pointing when things go wrong (and in last resort, the process itself gets finger pointed). More agility, means being successful as a team or failing as a team! No finger pointing required (this do not mean that we should not have a post-mortem). Even failing as a team is fun... compared to being alone getting the blame.