Infact, I am trying the iteration concept now. But, I doubt that introducing iteration alone will make much difference as the supporting practices for iteration are lacking. This will eventually kill iteration pilot pointing that it was a failure (or lack of success thereof).

We ultimately want to add more processes to ensure that nothing goes wrong rather than amplifying learning opportunities from mistakes.

I would differ from your view that moving to agile from no process is easier. If at all we have tried traditional methods and suffered due to them, I could atleast show them as case studies to promote agile. When I show outside case studies, they are brushed aside as “Doesn’t fit to us” answers.

I’ve read your book and since then I’ve been promoting agile in my organization. The problem here is, my organization is mostly ad-hoc in handling projects. They have burned their fingers more than once because of this approach and are now bent upon to move towards a “structured” methodology similar to waterfall. So, my rants on why waterfall is wrong doesn’t ring a bell to them. They counter by saying that lets first learn the traditional way of doing things and then talk about agile. I am out of ideas

It could well be that the team members that like waterfall for its predictability just don’t get confronted with the negative çonsequences of waterfall. They are quite comfortable in their role, doing their job delivering software according to the specifications. In many waterfall companies team members will never know whether or not the end-result meets the client’s business goals and probably won’t care. They’re happily locked in their (developer?) role.
This attitude is very much a personality and cultural thing and the team members are definitely in the follower quadrant in the article above.

-erik

I tend to be a voracious reader – but missed these so far. Maybe I add them to my Christmas list. Also, thanks for the clarification on your position… I hope we can be successful along these lines.

Raising the industry capability, helping people drive great quality and product… Getting all that branding out of the way would definitely help.

Jeff

I’m also on record as saying I want agile to go away. In the same sense that no one says “I need to go to the object-oriented design meeting at 9am” (they just call it a “design meeting”) I’m anxious for the time when we can stop talking about agile entirely. For more on that see the interview of me in Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders by Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene.