Failure is not an option!

I’ve heard that phrase a number of times during my career. Mostly by people imitating a manager they heard in a meeting, but still too often.

What’s remarkable is that this phrase is usually uttered at the moment that it is becoming very clear that, yes, failure seems to not just be an option, but fairly likely!

And that’s the thing. Failure is always an option. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

Change is hard. If we know that about 80% of organisational change programs fail, then it’s easy to appreciate just how hard. Why is that? And, more importantly, what can we do to make it easier?

Recently, I saw a tweet come by from Alan Shalloway. He wrote that, back in the days, people were saying: Waterfall (though they didn’t call it that, back then, I think) is fine, people are just not doing it right. All we need is apply enough discipline, and a little common sense, and it will work perfectly! I think Alan was commenting on an often heard sound in the Agile community about failing Scrum adoptions: You’re just not doing it right! You need to have more discipline

The third day of the London Scrum Gathering (day 1, day 2) was reserved for an Open Space session led by Rachel Davies and a closing keynote by James Grenning.

We started with the Open Space. I’d done Open Spaces before, but this one was definitely on a much larger scale than what I’d seen before. After the introduction, everyone that had a subject for a session wrote their subject down, and got in line to announce the session (and have it scheduled). With so many attendents, you can imagine that there would be many sessions. Indeed, there were so many sessions that extra spaces had to be added to handle all of them. The subject for the Open Space was to be the Scum Alliance tag-line: “Changing the world of work”;.

[ is now available on the Qualogy website.

The article is mainly meant as an introduction to agile principles and practices for Oracle developers that are new to them. It focused on explaining short feedback loops, and the importance of technical practices such as Continuous Integration and (Unit) testing for success with iterative and incremental development.

First day report here.

Steve Denning on Radical Management

(slides are here)

The second day of the London Scrum Gathering started with a Keynote by Steve Denning. Where yesterday’s workshop had been about his storytelling work, today he was full-on about Radical Management. He quickly sketched the main points of his book (which everyone got given in their goody bag, so I have two now…), and it’s relation and implications for all the Agile aficionados in the audience.

I’ve been having an interesting couple of weeks. Last week I attended the Lean and Kanban Benelux conference in Antwerp, and then had a wonderful three days with Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson when they came over at Qualogy to teach me and my collaeques in the ways of Agile development skills.

This week, I’m in London for the Scrum Gathering conference, meeting with lots of people I’ve so far only encountered over the twitter et al.