Last week at Valtech‘s Agile Edge conference Al Goerner gave a terrific key note session on Adapting Agile to the Enterprise.  In explaining the maturing of Agile practice he outlined the two generations of Agile:

1st Generation – Agile for the team

• Emphasising the Human Factors in development
• Emphasising Empowerment-to-a-goal
• A Gaggle of Gurus
• Naive Agile and Faux Agile

2nd Generation – Agile for the Enterprise

• Emphasising Risk Management
• Emphasising Backlog Management
• Emphasising Visibility and Accountability
• Emphasising the Whole Solution Value Stream

The 2nd Generation of Agile practices really resonates with me and I’m sure resonates with any Project Manager who has worked in large organisations. How many of us have wrangled with the 1st Generation  ’Gaggle of Gurus’? I certainly have!

Managing risk and providing visibility and accountability is so important in the enterprise and I’m completely inspired by Al Goerner’s presentation on exactly these issues. His most important point was that Agile doesn’t mean not focussing on these things and it doesn’t mean not producing documentation and certain other claims made by the 1st Generation-ers. The key thing is to only do things that have a point, that will be read, and not just as a formality or because they’re ‘required’.

Beam me up Scotty!

By empowering teams to be self-organising and making their own decisions you can certainly get great software results and team cohesion. However, you can’t always get a team that is capable of changing processes outside their immediate area, such as integration testing or other third party dependencies, so that timelines are shortened and goals met. In the Scrummaster course there was a lot of discussion about when is a task ‘done’. It seems that in a lot of organisations it is hard to get to ‘done’ due to dependencies on other teams such as a QA team or processes that create delays before a developer can say that their task is ‘done’. An empowered and experienced Scrummaster should be able to suggest and implement process changes to remove these delays and integrate with other teams or dependencies. If the Scrummaster role is being performed, on a rotating basis,  by developers or tech leads rather than managers with experience in process change then I think the team will struggle to get to ‘done’. Becoming self-organising doesn’t remove the need for management.

It struck me that surfing is one of those things where success begets success. Once you’ve stood up on the board you know you can do it again and then you want to do it again …and so you do. You’ve removed the psychological barrier of ‘can’t’ and you know that you can because you have done it and that spurs you to do it again and do it better.

I am now a few thousand miles from Santa Cruz but am finding that my surfing experiences are still in my thoughts and applying to my daily activities around Scrum. Last month the Magic Milestones team successfully launched the new look UKChina site for the BBC World Service which was our ninth new site for the 1024 project that we kicked off last November. It was a succesful project and an exciting individual launch and one of the best things about the 1024 project was that we did not encounter any organisational or individual ‘can’t’ about using Scrum.

Part of the reason for this 100% team engagement with Scrum was because as Scrummasters we had eliminated the ‘can’t’ from our minds and like the surfing lessons we were focussed on improving techniques for success and not on whether or not we could or couldn’t use Scrum to deliver. Magic Milestones had provided 3 Scrummasters for the 1024 project and we had all used Scrum at least once before, learned the basic techniques, experienced success and brought that attitude into the project. We had caught the wave, ridden it to shore and liked it enough to paddle back out to do it again. Our team members were a combination of permanent staff and contractors and were cross functional (designer, developer, product owners) and had varying levels of experience with Agile methods and the way we approached the project was new to all the teams. It is conceivable that some of them had reservations and resistance to using Scrum but I can’t say that I heard about this in my teams or noticed it in others and I think this may be because the Scrummasters were convinced about the ‘can’. Without being overt evangelists we led the teams to success in Wave 1 and we all liked it so much we did it again in Wave 2!

We didn’t encounter much fear of change or resistance to new techniques on this project By quickly experiencing success (the first site was launched within 60 days of kick off) we had buy-in and a team of winners. It must be said that the support from top management was crucial to this success and to the adoption of Scrum.

An article on the Scrum Alliance website refers to the ‘Emotional Impediments’ to successfully adopting Scrum in organisations. These are redefined in the comments as psychological impediments rather than emotional as the root cause of the impediment are not always accessible. The author (Michael De La Maza) suggests that support groups would help combat fear of change and resistance to new methods.

After the BBC experience, I feel that experiencing success is more of an antidote to fear of change than the support group suggested in that article. Committed leadership from Scrummasters can convince team members that it can be done and quick wins reinforce that conviction. This sets the foundation for longer term success. People are often afraid of their first time experience and the potential wipe out but once they’ve been shown how to do it and experienced their first wave I’m pretty sure they’ll all paddle back out to do it again.

I’m sure each Magic Milestones team member had their own Festival highlight but for me it was hearing David Simon discuss the creative process that produced The Wire as he stressed that none of the writers involved were ‘from television’ which has ultimately lead to the creation of the second best drama series on TV (I think The Sopranos pips it to the post but it’s still excellent) and then contrasting Simon’s sentiments about the societal results of free market capitalism with James Murdoch’s lecture which posited the opposite view – that ‘the only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.’  The contrast between the two positions was also mentioned by Dominic West when he accepted an award for The Wire at the Channel of the Year award on Saturday night.  The awards were hosted by Michael Macintyre who was hilarious and it’s hard to not laugh with someone who manages to find everything funny and introduced some welcome levity to the Festival. He also just looks funny  

Heather Brook at the Edinburgh Television Festival

Conversations about the BBC’s dominance in the UK broadcast media space and its impact and potential top-slicing plans featured strongly throughout the Festival which detracted a little from its ‘International’  title as the licence fee funding model is a strictly local issue  – if such a thing can exist in our online media age. I have to mention the funding issue as it really did dominate conversations but the more interesting topic to our MM group was the changing platform of media – archiving and the complicated rights model, TV on demand and audience behaviour/expectation. The media industry is at the cusp of where other industries like banking found itself 10 years ago (and this is not a comment on the economy for a change!).  Technological innovations weren’t, and aren’t, imposed upon ‘the masses’ but come from within ‘the masses’ in most cases. Ie., no-one sold ‘the internet’ to people. Users needed to be able to bank online and communicate with their banks, colleagues, friends, and schools etc. electronically and businesses adapted their practices and developed the applications that allowed the users to do that. The same thing is happening with media and users want to be able to watch TV on demand, listen live and catch up with programmes that they missed.  The ability to do these things and the technology to enable it is not new (iPlayer has been released for 18 months and set top boxes were being developed at least 10 years ago (probably longer, I’m not an expert but that’s when they came to my attention in my day-to-day life) but the business model for the broadcast media is at the point where it’s desperately trying to catch up. The platform for consuming media is changing fast and the business practices of rights management and pay walls are still being thrashed out.

The digital revolution of media is also discussed (with a lot more passion) on this blog http://simsblog.typepad.com/simsblog/2009/09/top-10-lies-newspaper-execs-are-telling-themselves.html which is interesting for its tech-driven view.  I don’t agree with all of the thoughts expressed, such as ‘I believe that a large percentage of online readers are content to read someone else’s analysis of the news rather than the news itself’  but it’s an interesting read for a techno viewpoint (I should probably disagree in the comments on the blog itself but I’m a bit scared by its angry tone! They might savage me and neither side of the debate is really dealing in facts, just opinion it would seem, so I’m staying at a distance :-S)

The philosophical concepts of scarcity and quality and economics of broadcast media are being debated alongside the rapidly changing methods of consumption and audience expectation and it was quite exciting to be party to the debates at Edinburgh this year.

In addition, Stephanie Chamberlain has been invited as a VIP guest to St James’ Palace for the gold award presentation!

More exciting news has just arrived at Magic Milestones – our very own Managing Director Steph is a regional finalist at the National Business Awards!

Steph faces 6 other finalists in The Entrepreneur of The Year Award for the Wales, Midlands and East Anglia region.

She’s currently preparing hard for a gruelling day of presenting to the judges before they announce their final decision at the awards ceremony on the 16th July.

If Steph wins, she’ll be entered into the National Awards, when judges select an overall winner from each of the regional winners.  Take a look at the list of finalists and other details.

Congratulations Steph and the best of luck for all your upcoming award ceremonies!

The Magic Milestones team at the BBC have been working hard over the last few months alongside World Service Future Media to re-launch 12 of their language sites in 1024 format and in a new, improved Content Management System.

Following on from the launches of BBCPersian.com and BBCBrasil.com, the team have had a launch-crazy last 6 weeks, launching 5 more sites.

BBCVietnamese.com, BBCUrdu.com, BBCWorldService.com, BBCMundo.com and BBCRussian.com were all project managed by members of the Magic Milestones team, and were all run according to Agile Methodology.

The sites are mainly news sites focusing on getting cutting edge journalism to all over the world, with the exception of BBCWorldService.com which is a support site for the extensive World Service radio network.

The intensity of the project put many demands on the team, and it’s a testament to their dedication and hard work that the sites look fabulous and that they managed to keep up the pace during this busy time.

Of course the hard work doesn’t stop here, and all involved have quickly moved on to working on the next wave of language sites to go 1024.  Watch this space…

Steph is one of 3 finalists in the Entrepreneurial category, and one of 18 finalists (consisting of the finalists from each category) for the overall BYPY award.

Steph’s already done fantastically well to make it this far, having had to answer a tough question and answer session in front of the BYPY Panel.  When you consider the fact that the panel’s members include Paul Thandi, Chief Executive of the NEC group; Richard Edwards, Midlands senior partner of Deloitte and Matt Taylor, chairman of Birmingham Future to name but a few, it becomes clear just how special these awards are.

The awards ceremony is on the 4th June, and the whole Magic Milestones team will be out in force to wish Steph luck.  Take a look at the website here.

I’m sure you’ll all join us in wishing Steph massive congratulations on yet another amazing achievement!

BBCWorldservice.com collects a whole variety of radio content, as well as podcasts, user-generated content and acting as a portal to 33 BBC language sites (many of which have also recently moved to 1024 format, including BBCVietnamese.com, BBCUrdu.com and BBCMundo.com)

The Project Management for the re-design into 1024 format and move to a new Content Management System was provided by Magic Milestones’ Christina Yeoh and the result is yet another example of the fantastic partnership between World Service Future Media and Magic Milestones.

I’m sure you’ll agree that the site is looking fantastic, so why not take 2 minutes to vote on http://pv.webbyawards.com/.  Simply register, go to “websites” then scroll down to the Media category and select Radio.

Good luck World Service – we’re sure you can win again!