program selection system

In the recording industry, producers help guide production by balancing creativity with costs, quality, and schedules. The great producers value and nurture the uniqueness of each project. The producer helps the players (and others) complete the project while providing a time and space for improvisation.

Agile coaches face similar challenges while helping communities deliver (produce) software. Sustainable agility often starts with an agile coach helping a community find its unique groove. Like the music producer, the coach needs to help the individuals as well as the community innovate and deliver.

This is a “talk with exercises”, “questioning agile” in terms of the constituencies involved in developing significant systems, their diverse concerns, and the reactions & aspirations that follow from having their concerns met, or not. Framing “Agile” or methods and tools in general this way, what can we learn? Questions like:

• If “waterfall” is bad, yet “waterfall” persists, why is that? Do we really have that many masochists in the world, or does it maybe appeal to a need?
• What the heck is the attraction of a PERT Chart? Of having a CCB?