Beautiful Teams

Chapter 26. Getting Past Obstacles

Scott Ambler

Scott Ambler helped lead the software world through two revolutions: first in the move to object-oriented analysis and design in the 1990s, and then in the adoption of agile practices in the decade that followed. He's spent a lot of his career focused on making enterprisewide changes, and doing that successfully means having to overcome obstacle after obstacle. We wanted to hear how he managed to make change work on that scale, especially when people around him weren't sure that it would work.

Jenny: We're interested in talking to you about your experience, and how you came to know about how teams work together.

Scott: Right now I'm the practice leader for agile development for IBM Software Group. For the most part, I help customers become more agile and more effective at what they're doing. I also work with IBM itself. A lot of that is helping people to work together more effectively, often in teams. I've written a few books, and done a lot of work in the agile community. I'm the guy behind Agile Modeling, the Agile Data Method, and the Enterprise Unified Process.

As far as my background in teaming, it's a lot of hard-earned experience, I guess. Software is developed in teams, for the most part. As a result, you either learn the easy or the hard way—and I guess for me it was the hard way—about how to work in teams.

Jenny: Getting companies to adopt the kinds of practices and techniques you talk about means convincing a lot of people ...