My transformation into an Agile devotee

When Scrum Alliance asked to write about my journey as Scrum devotee, I got my first active chance to reflect.

I started as software developer and with time gained some knowledge in a few (I thought it was various) technologies and people started to call me a technical architect.  During my career I worked on mostly customer facing assignments, and ventured into solution design and architecture.  With the progress in career, I also started managing teams – project teams, teams of technical & business architects. I also got introduced to Six Sigma and Lean which gave me lot of insight into process dynamics & improvement. But I realized that Six Sigma driven approach is good when processes involve lot of mechanical tasks with little or no human choices while executing the process.  Human behavior has many variables to model into mathematical equations. In Software industry even with high level of automation, human component is most dominant.

When pondering over Lean, I encountered Scrum, Kanban, Extreme programming and other Agile methodologies to execute a project with higher efficiency and higher effectiveness.  As I started swimming into Agile Ocean, I realized that swimming is good for my health and also for team members and project.  Since then, not only swimming, I am also diving into Agile Ocean, especially Scrum & Kanban Seas. While exploring Agile Ocean, I found numerous gems:

• Resources turned into humans – team mates
• Command and control structure turned in collaborative environment
• Short term gains turned into long term sustainability
• Work related stress turned into commitment for work
• Power  turned into mutual respect
• Management turned into leadership
• Resistance to change turned into flexibility
• Adhoc decisions turned to thought out mutually  beneficial agreements
• I win turned into Win – Win
• My goal turned into team’s goal
• Individual success or failure tuned into Team’s success or failure
• Insistence on process turned into team and outcome
• Big upfront design (revolution)  turned into evolution of design and architecture
• Quick-fix turned into robust solution

I also found mythological Paras Stone (In Indian mythology, Paras stone transform Iron into gold, just by touch) – Patience.

During my swimming and diving, I also learned about Scrum & Kanban frameworks – roles, ceremonies, artifacts, information radiators, team structure, good practices, patterns, and more.