Change Is In The Air

Approximately eight months ago, I returned from Agile 2007 (in Washington, D.C.) and advocated some changes at work that I (and others who'd attended the conference) felt were critical to our success as an Agile software development organization. These were referred to as our "Top 7 Learnings," at least by me. I talked them up, and talked them up, and tried to do everything I could to get some traction for them. Two of them involved introducing or refining a couple of roles: Agile Coach, and Customer Proxy. Other than some small experimentation (including a lot of good work by Boneman), though, not much really happened.

However, for the past couple of months, the executives have been diligently working away to figure out some organizational changes that would - among other things - emphasize and support those "Top 7 Learnings." I've known some of what was going on, but had to keep a lid on most of it while progress continued largely under the radar. Today was an important day in that journey as our company president let everyone know that, yes, a re-org is coming, and yes, it will begin to unfold in the next week or two. That's a big statement to make, because as I said earlier: this has been in the making, in one form or another, for almost eight months! As such, there were some who doubted that it would ever happen, and at times that included me.

The aspect of the re-org that I'm most involved with is the introduction of Agile Coaches. The goal is to have an Agile Coach - although they won't be called that, as the execs have their own title in mind, which is fine - on every Feature Team. My own motivation in this area is to get someone attached to each team who understands the Agile principles and can spend as much time as it takes to support the team members in their living of those principles. As I wrote about at length in The Real-Life Adventures of AgileMan (Lessons Learned in Going Agile), we've suffered for years from a culture of spreading people thin in the hopes that one person could somehow do the work of two, three or even four people. I'm really, truly hoping that the introduction of Agile Coaches ("a rose by any other name") will finally allow us to end that insanity. While teams certainly have many important responsibilities, they don't have to take on the duties that others around them are dropping... and yet that happens on a regular basis in our office these days!

But maybe not for much longer.