Friday, November 28, 2014

Agile stats from Scott Ambler


We're always looking for some agile statistics to see how things are going. Here's some decent stuff from Scott Ambler, an agile thinker, author, practitioner of some renown.

I heard Ambler give this live at a PMI presentation in Orlando recently. He's pretty animated when he talks live, so some of the energy of presentation may be missing from just the slides.

I was struck by a couple of things he said (to 100 PMPs assembled at dinner):
  • In 10 years most of what we think of as project management will be gone... some management will be around, but not like we know it. This didn't do much to motivate the room of PMPs to move to agile.
  • Agile in the main is a risk management strategy (I've been saying that for years, so nice to get some validation)
  • All serious agile is a hybrid that marries up traditional swim lanes (see page 23) ... ditto my thoughts on agile in the waterfall
  • Beware: pilot projects often don't lead to successful general purpose agile teams because there's too much optimization in pilots ... probably true
  • It could take years to transition a large scale enterprise to agile... OMG, that sounds awful... but probably true, unless you just sweep out all the people and start over... it happens.

Read in the library at Square Peg Consulting about these books I've written
Buy them at any online book retailer!
http://www.sqpegconsulting.com
Read my contribution to the Flashblog