Mark Levison: "I've started a page on the Scrum Alliance wiki to document Agile/Scrum Failures. The failures are not of the process itself but of the humans associated with the project. "
It's courageous to put up a failures page (or what some companies call a 'blackbook'). But there's a problem with the "humans" part of that quote - processes get a pass when projects fail becuase when the project fails, issues are ascribed to people. Contrariwise, I don't tend to see XP/Scrum/Prince/Waterfall success stories blaming the humans associated with the project instead of the process ;) In one respect that makes all processs arbitary - as long as it's a people root cause under failure and a process root cause under success, you might as well be in a cargo cult, or doing witchcraft. Where's the science in that?
That's why I like approaches like TPS and Lean as wrappers around Agile methods - failure, inefficiency, waste are assumed, accepted and objectively worked through (Hansei resulting in Kaizen). It's a people and a process problem.
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Nice post. Other things we can assume - mixed bag of people, disagreement over practices. Focusing on higher level of principles encourages team to evolve practices that suit them and support their principles - with greater buy in etc...
Project success/failure are usually directly related to quality of communication. (Communication being the lowest common denominator of any process). Many projects with great people on the team fail. And many projects with mediocre people succeed.
So "it's a people and a process problem" can be boiled down to - it's a communication problem. How boring is that?
I couldn't really agree more. I have had much more luck with business people using Lean than Agile. I think that Lean is more comprehensive where Agile is mostly focused on optimization of development. This can alienate the business side. Also Lean is often started on the business side. In lots of companies, the business side is hesitant to "follow" development. In the end Lean and Agile complement each other & you use techniques from both, but the combination in my experience results in lethal teams. Its really joy to be on these kinds of teams.
I tried to find a link to an article on Lean vs. Agile that goes into decent depth on some of the reasoning on why Lean tends to work better with business people, but its gone. It was here: http://sphereofinfluence.com/soiblogs...
which was @ one time linked to off of the Lean Software Dev wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_sof...