Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

25

JAN

A Disaster of Quality

25 JAN 2011 | Posted in agile engineering techniques, agile methodology, Government, quality | Author Jason Smith | 1 Comment

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I get to talk to organisations of all shapes and sizes about Agile methods and the key message I hear, especially in the public sector, is that Agile is about applying the best engineering techniques to software delivery. It isn’t. A focus on engineering techniques is attractive because they are easy to understand, they are relatively easy to implement and they produce higher quality deliverables – who could argue with that? Well, me, actually.

The first problem is that people equate quality with reliability or at least the ease at which something can be supported. Quality is actually about value for money and fitness for purpose. It is not an arcane technical point about the number of faults in a system. It is about delivering the right things in a timely and reliable manner.

The next problem is that although reducing errors by testing or improving design by refactoring is great, it is not nearly as important as being able to deliver the right things quicker. And delivering the right things quicker requires changes to the way projects are managed and programmes are governed. And management change is hard. And scary. If you tell people that a technique reduces risk, they like the sound of it. When you point out that that reducing risk means they will have to make decisions and be held accountable for them, they don’t like it nearly as much. So people avoid management change or pretend they want it but don’t make the necessary deep changes to apply it. Even when people do apply some of the Agile project management techniques (such as Scrum), they are often at a trivial level and the bandwagon’s wheels come flying off when they are applied to more complex problems.

By avoiding the management and governance changes that release the true benefits of an Agile approach, organisations simply end up delivering the wrong things more reliably  The project disasters that we all see in the public sector (and we all know happen in the private sector) will continue. But at least they will be of the highest quality.