Another Agile Success Story
It seems that agile and Scrum are just continuing to gain popularity and visibility. Now, Inc. Magazine has a success story on how one company’s agile transformation has them behaving more like a start-up, i.e. using small teams to work more collaboratively and responding more nimbly to emerging developments. According to the article, as Chicago-based Total Attorneys grew from a start-up of four to a company of more than 100, the maker of CRM software for law firms decided to implement a more formalized development strategy. They turned to waterfall. But soon, they realized that the development process had become so fragmented that coders handling different aspects of development (i.e. design versus testing) never saw one another and morale started tanking. Also, CEO Ed Scanlan explained, “We had more than a hundred employees, but we were getting a lot less done than when it was just me and three other people.”
Scanlan’s reaction was to implement agile management practices. He divided his employees into small groups of roughly five or six people per team; re-imagined the floor plan so that all employees sat together for convenient collaboration; and mandated a daily Scrum meeting, when team members can report to one another. Because the team harnessed agile’s iterative and incremental approach to development, it was, significantly, able to shorten deadlines and deliver software more rapidly.
While I like to see case studies of how companies have used agile techniques to improve their own processes, there are a number of sticking points in this story. Namely, it sounds like Total Attorneys have applied a “Frankenstein” approach to agile—they’ve pulled their favorite bits from a number of frameworks and methods and built a monster out of them. Granted, this is a populist publication that is effectively introducing readers to the concept of agile project management, so we can’t realistically expect the reporter to engage the nuances of agile the way we would here on this blog, where we’re all well-versed in Scrum, XP, and so on.
How does this article strike you? Is it another victory for agile in the media? Or is it represented in a harmful way?