Agile Culture - the real Agile issue

When traditional project management (GANTT charts, scope, etc) begun to be adopted in the early-70's by business and IT projects from construction and engineering disciplines not only did we borrow their tools but covertly we adopted their culture. The "expert knows what is best for you" values that were well established in architecture, design and construction became the cultural norm for IT. For example, calling a banking manager with 20 years of experience and an MBA a "user" is a perfect example of how IT had adopted the "expert knows best" attitude. Some 40 years after I began my IT and project management journey, I still hear a statement we often said in 1969. "The problem with my users is that they don't know what they want and they change their minds all the time!"

In effect, traditional project management and development approaches typically exhibited a closed, distrusting and often dishonest set of values towards those ##xx users and senior management. Stakeholders were asked to sign-off documents such as Business Cases and requirements without any open participation in their creation. In many cases, the users were only involved in testing and documentation activities (you know, the actvities IT people don't like).

As we work to assist people and organizations become more Agile, the most important conversation we must have with them is a cultural conversation.

All Agile models are based on openness, honesty, trust and courage.

These values fundamentally change the behavior of project managers and developers as well as fundamentally change how business experts and senior business people sponsoring projects interact, relate and behave to each other.

Agile is not about techniques such as XP, Scrum and so on.

It is about behaving differently.