Tailor your Message To Gain Support for your Agile Initiative | Enabling Agility - 0 views
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Connect Agile’s Benefits to your Company’s Priorities
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aying that Agile is “better, faster, cheaper” may not be enough to cause a company to be willing to go through the often-painful process of cultural and process change. You could implement Agile, but you could also try Six Sigma or Lean. Saying that Agile is a general get-better remedy puts it in line with many other get-better methods.
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ur last two releases have looked like me-too updates, where we are just barely keeping up with our competitors
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f they don’t see a meaningful update from us, at least once a quarter, we’re going to get kicked out of the game. We’ve all acknowledged that as we’ve gotten bigger, our processes have become more cumbersome and now is the time to do something about it. Agile will give us the ability to regain that rapid pace of delivering innovations to market that we were know for in our early days.”
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If you can refer to a specific business issue and show the linkage, you are much more likely to get a receptive audience. Here’s an example.
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certain volume of people who are enrolled in the idea of Agile before you’ll see adoption start to accelerate,
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People have specific needs in their role and they want to understand how Agile will affect and benefit them directly.
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Developers, on the other hand, probably wants to know if they will have interesting work, the opportunity to learn new things and the ability to make an impact on the company’s products.
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The CFO, developer and QA manager have different roles in the organization and their needs are different. If you want to enlist their support, be sure you know who you are talking to and what they value.
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The easiest way to find out what interests someone is to ask them. When you meet, leave plenty of time for talk. Motoring through a well-rehearsed Agile presentation usually doesn’t work. A lot of times I’ll have slides with me, but they are a backdrop for the conversation. I’ll refer to slides when it helps move the conversation along, but otherwise don’t use them. You might want to forget slides altogether and just draw things on a whiteboard as necessary. This technique is particularly useful with an individual or a small group.
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you’ll be most effective tailoring your message if you invest some time conducting data through a series of structured interviews.
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First, you’ll need a small set of questions prepared for the interviews. Here are some examples. What is working with our current methodology? What’s not working with our current methodology? How do you think Agile would help our organization? What concerns do you have about Agile?
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Interview a wide range of people: developers, testers, business analysts, managers, product managers, senior management, project managers and someone from finance.
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When you conduct the interviews, it is good to have one interviewer who has the primary responsibility for talking and the other person who has the primary job of taking notes. You can switch off roles each interview so no one person gets stuck in either role. Here’s how I typically start off.
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I put all of the information we’d gathered into a mind-mapping program (Mindjet) and grouped like things together.
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When there’s numerical data, people engage with a presentation in an entirely different way than they do when there are stories. I find stories more effective, but do what works for you.
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As an Agile evangelist, you job is to get Agile deployed effectively. Along the way there are many people will be willing to go out of their way to help if you effectively speak to their interests and concerns.