tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87320332628905263432011-09-24T11:28:32.924-07:00The Project Management San Francisco Bay Area Agile BlogPMI-SFBACnoreply@blogger.comBlogger21100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732033262890526343.post-76560397151469139192010-06-21T16:39:00.000-07:002010-06-21T16:45:09.651-07:00Due to popular demand Masa K. Maeda will be giving again his webinar "Moving From Failing to Successful Agile Adoption" .<br />When: June 23 at 9AM PDT<br />Registration<br />      <a href="http://www.agilistapm.com/failing-to-success2/">http://www.agilistapm.com/failing-to-success2/</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8732033262890526343-7656039715146913919?l=pmi-sfbac-agile.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>PMI-SFBACnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732033262890526343.post-37105150799108991442010-06-21T16:23:00.000-07:002010-06-21T16:24:25.808-07:00by Masa K Maeda, Ph.D, CPO, CSM, Kanban coach<br /><br /> <br />Many years ago when I was in college I had the opportunity to see the movie Ikiru (生きる) by Akira Kurozawa. As a nice way to finish my work-week, I just finished watched it again while having dinner. The story is around an elderly man, Watanebe-san, who is a public office head of department who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. He immediately starts a desperate hunt to recover the 30 years he spend doing nothing as a public official, and after much soul searching he decides to help build a public park at a low income neighborhood. The park is finished shortly before his death, whose cause was unknown to his coworkers and family. At his funeral reception there are about a dozen other public officials of different ranks. It is there where an amazing display of red-tape bureaucracy is made clear through their behavior. After much drinking and discussing, those who remained at the room came to the figured out the reason for Watanabe's death and also came to the realization of what he had done during his last months of life: push away bureaucracy and truly do something good for the community. Inspired by it they all made the resolution to make their work as meaningful as possible and really serve the public—only to get back to the same bureaucracy once being back to work the next day.<br />
There is a parallel to the story and why some agile projects fail and, worse, why entire organizations fail in its adoption. Simply put, it is very easy to get back to the old habits! Many organizations claim to be doing agile, say, Scrum, XP, FDD, Kanban or whatever else; but in reality they still do the same things they were doing before with very minor modifications such as not sitting at their periodic meetings or using post-it notes for their use cases, or using a fashionable agile word to name the same old process. This, more often than not, results in even worse dynamics than before the "adoption". If you want your organization to really adopt lean-agile then you have to fully embrace it and be willing to go through what it takes to really make the transition. This means you have to accept the fact that your organization will have to go through a cultural change because doing agile (or, better, lean-agile) is primarily about changing the way we think, and that will drive the way we do things.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8732033262890526343-3710515079910899144?l=pmi-sfbac-agile.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>PMI-SFBACnoreply@blogger.com0