There seems to be a low level flame war occurring at the moment between advocates of Agile and supporters of Lean. It seems to me that this is rather like two bald men arguing over a comb. The assumption within these communities is that these new methods are embedded and understood throughout the IT industry. This is reinforced by the fact that the supporters spend a large amount of time talking to each other via blogs, newsgroups, message boards etc. And when they are not online, they attend seminars and conferences to talk to each other about the same things in person. All of this strengthens the illusion that a much wider community understands about these methods than actually exists.
My main job is sales. I probably attend around 3 or 4 sales meetings with customers or prospective customers per week and they are usually at a fairly senior level. And, for first meetings, around 70% of the people I meet have never heard of Agile or Lean. Hard to believe isn’t it? For every 10 CIOs or Software Development Directors I meet, 7 of them have no idea that Agile and Lean exist in IT or what benefits they can bring.
Since 2002 my colleagues have assured me that Agile is on the tipping point to becoming the de facto way of running projects. Lean advocates assure me that soon their ways of identifying value and reducing waste will be endemic. I can see precious little evidence of that in the real world. And until we become better at proselytising these methods to people outside our communities and stop internecine bickering about which adds the most value, they will remain a country lane off the information super highway.
Tags: Agile