Comments on: Doing Agile is a Sign of Incompetence

By: Rekindling the Agile fire « Iteration Zero

Rekindling the Agile fire « Iteration Zero — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:19:07 +0000

[...] in Agile, Retrospective by Mark Henery on February 11, 2010 I read a little while ago a good article about doing Agile vs being Agile. It got me thinking about why I keep coming across people that think they are being Agile but [...]

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 04:58:15 +0000

Hmm… I read blogs on a similar topic, but i never visited your blog. I added it to favorites and i’ll be your constant reader.

By: Doing agile is a sign of incompetence « Agile stuff

Doing agile is a sign of incompetence « Agile stuff — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:24:25 +0000

[...] think of a better way to start my blog than to reference a rececent blog from someone else: [doing agile is a sign of incompetence]. I read this a few days ago and it rang true with me in more ways than [...]

By: Doing Agile is a Sign of Incompetence « Being not doing

Doing Agile is a Sign of Incompetence « Being not doing — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 04:43:16 +0000

By: taraleewhitaker

taraleewhitaker — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 12:21:42 +0000

I Agree! In fact, I just replaced the Youtube URL with the link to that video within the Agile101 video section, where I’ve summarised a few of the key discussion points.

For those of you interested in watching other videos about Agile Retrospectives, check out the video section – http://agile101.net/category/video/.

Tara

By: Jonas

Jonas — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 10:34:04 +0000

You should watch the Google Tech Talk “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great!” (http://agile101.net/2009/08/15/agile-retrospectives-making-good-teams-great/) where they’re basically saying that if the only thing you do are retrospectives all agile practices should come out of it eventually.

By: Shu-Ha-Ri related to competence « shino.de

Shu-Ha-Ri related to competence « shino.de — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:32:21 +0000

[...] At the beginning of this week an article I read reminded me of Shu-Ha-Ri and Situational Theory. Find the article on the following link: Doing Agile is a sign of incompetence. [...]

By: Mr Spoon

Mr Spoon — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:07:19 +0000

We struggled with agile. To the point where a week was even added on to the project so that we could ‘learn agile’ – I still chuckle at the irony!
In the end, we stopped trying so hard to follow the entire agile gospel and concentrated more on what it was supposed to be achieving.

We did just one thing that changed everything!
We arranged a weekly demo with the users. That was it. No scrums, nothing else at all. Forget all the other pages of rules. Just do that one thing. After that, everything else fell into place – we HAD to design, code and build in a certain way to be able to turn over code at that speed. After a few weeks, we HAD to have ‘daily meetings’ to chat about which areas to focus on. Then, suddenly, we realised that we were now following most of the agile principals – just through necessity to meet those demos.

By: Bob MacNeal

Bob MacNeal — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:00:22 +0000

Tara – helpful distinction between being and doing!

Many organizations think capital expenditures on software tracking & planning tools is tantamount to being agile. Plan, spend, and execute. It seems easy.

Typically, the planning & tracking software CAPEX comes from IT with no coordination with the “beneficiaries” from the business side. Short shrift is given to coaching. And there’s no budget left for courses or conferences.

I have dubbed this “lazy man’s agile”. Lazy man’s agile is less productive, and no more inspiring, than a pile-driven waterfall from a command-and-control organization.

Our lesson is simple. People are first. All the other trappings are…well…trappings. Don’t let the easy path of tools and templates drain the humanity from a great idea.

Hire coaches. Send your team to conferences. Start with the relatively low-cost, low-expectation of showing incremental improvement. To me, this is “doing” and “being” at the same time.