Changing Software Development: Learning to Become Agile

11.3. Change Events

Many of the ideas that we've looked at in this book are personal (e.g. listening more) and some work in the background (e.g. creating book groups). Sometimes you want to say very openly 'We're going to try to learn something' or 'We're going to change things around here'.

Such occasions happen when you need to speed things up, when you've become stuck, when a problem really needs to be solved or when you decide to grasp an opportunity. On such occasions, a more direct approach can be useful.

Your first thought might be to call a meeting. You spell out the problem and ask everyone to come up with a solution. And all too often, such meetings end in failure ... You don't understand the problem well enough and can't agree on the course of action, let alone the solution. Someone will ask 'Is this the problem we really want to solve?' and then a wide-ranging debate follows, on a hundred different problems, and no two people agree on which one you should solve. Or perhaps the opportunity that you see simply isn't seen by others ... or maybe you agree on what needs to be done, but nobody follows through on it, so the action doesn't take place.

That's if you are lucky. If you're unlucky, the meeting will run around the same old solutions and the fact that 'they've been tried before and they didn't work'. However, meetings don't have to be like this. There are a range of events that don't necessarily conform to the standard meeting for getting people to think about problems ...