Agile George

Since my career delivered me to the world of agile, I have mainly worked with organisations that were in the process of an agile transformation. This is a very different environment to any other. When an organisation makes any kind of large scale cultural change it is almost inevitable that it will face problems from almost everyone who wasn't involved (or felt they were involved) in the decision to transition. When we as a community talk about agile, we typically talk about the empowerment of this or that group. In this post I'm going to explore what empowering a team means from a middle management level, which in my experience is often the level where agile transformations can fail spectacularly.

This week's Adventures with Agile meetup was a seminar by Sharon Bowman, author of Training from the Back of the Room. As with all the best talks it was both engaging and informative. We were taught in my favourite way; by doing what we were learning. As one person on my table said, "This is incredibly meta." Here are my takeaway points.