Agile Is In My Blood

It's striking to me how different my perspective is these days, as a result of my time as the Agile Manager at my previous job. I'm currently working in an environment that's not in the least Agile, and yet I still seem to perceive what's going on around me with Agile-Vision, as it were.

For example, I've spotted an instance where the separation between the business people and the development team has caused some issues, and so it seems fairly clear to me that that gap needs to be bridged somehow. It seems to me that there are lots of options available to be considered, even outside of an Agile methodology.

I can also see where delivering what's promising to be a fairly large feature set for the current project in smaller chunks will almost certainly help, even if the "delivery" here simply means working on the features in such a way as to allow the business folks to play around with them as they "come off the line". This won't be the Agile practice of working within short Iterations and having each small group of features "done done done", but at least it'll open up the possibility of getting feedback on many of the pieces before the development cycle is complete.

And finally, I've begun tossing around the idea of using something akin to a Retrospective for areas where the general consensus is that not enough is being learned or improved upon. That may apply to relationships between groups, or to preventing the same mistakes made in Phase N of the project from being repeated in Phase N+1. When I described what a Retrospective was to a few people, they seemed to like the idea ("like a Post Mortem, but focused on improving and learning instead of blaming and arguing"). So we'll see how that flies.

It's certainly odd to be back in a work environment that's so strangely different from what I was used to and yet still experiencing many of the same challenges. Go figure!