Pushing the boundaries of agile

Over the past two weeks I have three quite different experiences of Agile in the real world.  They were all good experiences and confirmed my belief that Agile is becoming part of the fabric of organisations.

I was very honoured to be asked to give an Agile course to MSc students at a University just outside London.  Whilst many of the students started with little or no knowledge of Agile, they soon embraced the concepts behind it and saw the benefits of using approaches such as DSDM, SCRUM, KANBAN and Lean.  This culminated in them taking and passing the Agile Foundation qualification from DSDM (dsdm.org) aimed at testing generic agile knowledge and mindset as opposed to adherence to one practice or another.

In my whistlestop two week journey, my next station was Washington DC to a seminar organised by AFEI (afei.org).  The audience this time were from US government departments and also the Software Engineering Institute.  As with governments across the globe, they have been reticent to adopt agile as it appeared not a good fit to their regulations and processes.

Now Agile is becoming more prevalent in large enterprises, and there are frameworks such as the DSDM framework that address governance issues, the barriers have come down and the move to Agile in government can go full steam ahead.

The audience really enjoyed the one day DSDM seminar, run in parallel with a SAFe seminar, and many thought DSDM was a good framework for government.

So a brief stop back at base then on to Copenhagen and the two day Nordic Project Zone http://nordicprojectzone.com/ , targeted mainly at Project Managers and particular those using PMI.

There were three tracks - one dedicated to Agile, showing how important it is to PMs, even if some agilists believe you can do without them (which I do not).  Again I was extremely pleased to be asked  to chair the Agile track as well as presenting and running Birds of Feather session on Agile at the Enterprise level.  The quality of the talks was extremely high and the track was well attended.  Topics ranged from building high performing agile teams that are geographically and culturally dispersed, measuring value and cost of delay as a means to prioritisation, scaling agile to enterprise level and the role of the PMO in Agile.

I am looking forward to the next Project Zone in Frankfurt next April.

Tiring as the trip was, it is great to see Agile pushing its boundaries further and further.