Agile Management

I have recently been involved with a project that had a great development team – project manager, BA, server-side and UI developers and a QA team – all co-located and pulling merrily and effectively along together towards the same objectives.

Whilst we undertook some pretty serious refactoring efforts as the Product Owner (rightly) demanded a change of direction and focus, there were numerous issues that arose as senior managers who had little knowledge or understanding of the project – or possibly more importantly Agile – came under increasing pressure to “do something” as the timelines wore on due to the change of direction.

Kelly Waters’ post on why Agile must be adopted and understood from the top-down pretty succinctly sums up many of the challenges we faced, particularly around stakeholder management and expectations.

As I’ve mentioned before in response to a similar post by Mark Schumann, it’s a shame and a surprise to me that those who do not understand or are not involved directly in an Agile project, but are nonetheless in positions of influence and supposed control, cannot do a little more to understand what is in essence a fairly simple, and I doubt particularly uncommon, scenario.

Monday, February 8th, 2010 Code

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