Sometimes there are dark days

Maybe all the grim economic news has me down. The thought occurred to me yesterday that possibly some of the people on my team are attracted to and proclaim support for agile due to a mistaken belief that it is just project management lite. They don't see a lot of paper and ceremony and they think "gee this is a lot better than the place I use to be where we had to write all those software requirements specifications and fill out all those change request forms. I can just do what I enjoy - writing code....." And there in lies the central problem for someone promoting an agile development model. It is easier to give someone a check list to fill out or a template to complete than it is to shift their values or beliefs. If one is truly faced with some one who is so ego centric that they are primarily motivated just doing a private intellectual exercise - code writing you've got an up hill battle facilitating agile adoption. Maybe a hopeless one.

Going back to the Agile Manifesto, it is primarily a values statement. If you don't buy in to the values you'd really be better off with a cook book approach. The teams I've met and worked with that are truly practicing agile have been and are very driven by process. Ironically this is the opposite perception of those who don't understand agile and speak negatively about it. I met one of those people the other day. He started the conversation with "I hate Agile it cost our company x dollars on a project we did using that some time ago." He elaborated "when we got to the end nothing worked and there was lots of finger pointing. " Our conversation on Agile was tangential to our primary discussion and it wasn't the place to start evangelizing about agile. I should have been quick enough to key in on the "got to the end nothing worked part" My gut feel is that perhaps it was one of those loose type processes that masquerade as an agile project. Instead I said well "Agile isn't appropriate in every situation." That is also true.
And here's the part where I make my self feel better. What I needed to do in that situation was build a new relationship, not get on a soap box about Agile. So I was living the values statement of putting people ahead of process. In the end I can only hope that if I can influence people by being genuine and living the values I profess. And, throw a few hardballs like I did today when I called our team on letting the bug backlog build up.