Are we thought leaders?
After yet another unimpressive Agile-vs-Waterfall debate I can’t help but think to myself that we frequently end up in this dead end street. We keep bringing up the same arguments over and over again - citing our experience with processes and techniques like Scrum, Refactoring, Continuous Integration and Unit Testing. Makes me start thinking about our claim at thought leadership.
So I did the fashionable first step - and looked up the definition of thought leadership at Wikipedia! There are a bunch of definitions but I liked this one the most (at least the most applicable):
“A distinguishing characteristic of a thought leader is the recognition from the outside world that the company deeply understands its business, the needs of its customers, and the broader marketplace in which it operates.”
Sounds reasonable. However just above I find the following paragraph:
“At professional services firms, such as consultancies and accounting firms, thought leadership has gone from the quest to discover new innovative ideas to engage in a discussion with clients, to the repackaging and publishing of old ideas. As a result, the term has been diluted.”
Can anybody else hear the alarm bells ringing? Are we not just repackaging old ideas? Let’s have a look shall we?A quick research provides the following timeline:
| 1986 | Scrum I: Takeuchi and Nonaka first describe (and even mention “Scrum”) in their publication “The New Product Development Game” (Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 1986).Also, a high-spec IBM PC featured an Intel 80286 processor running at 8MHz, 640KB RAM and a gigantic 20MB hard drive. |
| 1988 | Barry Boehm introduced the Spiral model in which he described an iterative and incremental approach to software development. This model was not the first model to discuss iterative development, but it was the first model to explain why the iteration matters. |
| 1995 | The first version of DSDM was completed in January 1995 and was published in February 1995. The current version in use as of April 2006 is Version 4.2: Framework for Business Centered Development released in May 2003.In related news Windows 95 and the very first version of Internet Explorer were released. |
| 1996 | Ken Schwaber talked about Scrum (as we know it) in public for the first time. Kent Beck joined the famous C3 project at Chrysler. |
| 1999 | Based on his experience at Chrysler Beck published the book “Extreme Programming Explained” - XP was born.Intel released the Pentium III chipset. |
| 2001 | The Agile Manifesto was signed and Apple unleashed the iPod mania on us. |
So not so new ideas after all. But what should we talk about instead? Well, agile is a state of mind. So instead of talking about processes and development basics maybe we should emphasize people and teams more.
- Talk about how we achieve self-organized teams (rather than that we want to have them).
- Talk about how more traditional roles (Business Analysts, Testers, Developers, Project Managers) change but still exist - “Same role - different responsibilities”.
- Talk about some of the myths of software development and how they are no longer true - Cost of Change, databases, prototypes just to name a few. I will expand on them in another post …
We are doing a great job talking about Agile Project Management - and I think we really are thought leaders in this space. I believe we need to step up to the same level in the area of Agile Software Development!
August 17th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Eduard, I just love you
:-)
There I am, having the exact same thoughts and deeply relieved that someone else observes the same things. And then is even able to express them much more eloquently than I ever could.
Want to co-present first to Fronde and then to the world?
August 17th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
Didn’t we set out from Vienna to conquer the world
?
August 18th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
wasn’t there some other famous austrian with the same intention??
August 18th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
You had to bring that up didn’t you? But if you read closely we VALUE people … ALL people
August 18th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
of course you do. admirable. i bet you’re a vegetarian as well