Your boss has the power, and the incentive, to undermine any improvement

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Taryn East:

If you’ve ever tried to implement an agile transition in a traditional workplace, you’ll know there are many stumbling blocks – one of the greatest being that of the existing stakeholder: Your boss, the invader from Mars explains how change can and should be dealt with by both the SCRUM and kanban approaches to agile development – and how that can easily be messed up by your boss.

The case-study especially strikes a chord with my experiences, describing a shop wanting to “become more agile” but not actually implementing agile processes, instead trying to add the “agile” on top – with a rather apt simile where the agile process are described as “layered over existing dysfunctions as a sort of veneer”.

The article then goes on to show various ways in which a boss who is not fully vested in the agile approach can unhinge the transition process… but also lets us learn the various lessons from that so a we can hopefully improve upon it in our own attempts.

Post external references

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    http://rubyglasses.blogspot.com/2013/07/link-your-boss-invader-from-mars-or-how.html
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