Agile Otter Blog

One day, a fish came to visit some kangaroos. He saw right away that the kangaroos spent all their time hopping on the dusty ground and browsing among the shrubs. Their habits would never work, and surely lead to their deaths, if they were to come to the ocean reefs even for a single month! "Foolish kangaroos," he called to them, "heed my words and live! This hopping and browsing is pointless madness! You must learn to paddle and snatch live prey from among the rocks! The ocean is no place for hopping air-breathing creatures, so come follow me and learn the better way!" The kangaroos, amazingly well-adapted to their un-ocean-ly environment, dutifully ignored the fish. They looked for common ground for conversation, but somehow the topic always turned to the futility of hopping and the unpleasantness of a dry environment. Sometimes they asked polite questions, and the patient among them tried to explain that their way of life was forever on solid ground whe...

A friend of mine (Hi George D) suggested that this would make a good poster, but all I have is a couple of blogs, so here is the message that inspired my buddy. My experience is that the less well a team has done in the past, the more oversight is piled on, and that oversight reaches higher and higher levels. There really is no legitimate reason for the CEO to want to know which programmer 5 or more levels below was assigned to a particular task and if he's behind schedule by a week or so. In healthier organizations, the groups and managers that interface with the development group tend not to have the same meddlesome urges. In our transitions, the biggest problem we face tends to be peeling back the expensive and unnecessary oversight. If the team can be rebooted and work with a single stream of smaller, simpler stories (rest of agile practices included) then they can win over the rest of the org in relatively short order. Sometimes in only a year or two, som...