Blame Pie - Is it preventing you from achieving Agile Nirvana?

This past week I participated in a product development strategy session with one of our newer customers out in New York City. During the session they described the numerous challenges that they're currently facing with their existing life-cycle.

An Appetite for Agile

To kick things off I asked the group where they felt that they needed Appfire's help the most. One of the attendees jumped in (half jokingly) and said:

"Randall, we expect nothing short of achieving Agile Nirvana!"

I smiled. It was actually the perfect transition into a great exercise that I like to perform with many our customers. I immediately stood up, grabbed a marker and wrote his statement up on the whiteboard.

My response was simple: "Done."

Prepare a Pie ...

I proceeded by asking each of the attendees to describe the aspects of their current process, methodology, and tools that they felt had a negative impact on their current ability to deliver product. I listened, documented and categorized each item. I then quickly scored the categories, went back to the whiteboard and drew out a large circle. I broke the circle into wedges, labeled them and assigned percentage points for each category.

I told them that I refer to this as the "Blame Pie" and that it's what is preventing them from achieving their "Agile Nirvana".

... then Dive in!

It's pretty straight forward I told them. Address the Blame Pie head-on targeting the biggest wedges, and you'll dramatically affect the way you're able to execute against your goals.

So what are the categories, you might ask?

My personal opinion is that the categories themselves are not as important as their identification, because they'll always vary a bit from client to client. This is natural as each client has their own unique set of challenges. However, I do cross paths with the following list over and over:

• Lack of Transparency (Usually due to fear)
• Focus
• Discipline
• Staffing
• Improper tooling (Missing or misaligned tools)
• Accountability

With the "Blame Pie" rendered, I then began to focus our conversation around ways that they can address their largest challenges. By the end of the session we had addressed every single wedge using a combination of proper Agile methodologies in conjunction with proper tooling. The greatest thing is that this is pretty much the same result for every customer that I run through this exercise.

So what does your "Blame Pie" look like? ...and more importantly, what are you doing to address it so you can achieve your Agile Nirvana?