Panel
Sallyann Freudenberg — internal agile coach (permanently employed)
- previously did PhD in collaborative software development
- approach: gently let things bubble up and then deal with them
James Davison — head of PM at Razorfish (previously at ThoughtWorks)
- has come across a lot of politics
- don’t think you can stay out of it — perception is very important
- try get everyone into the same space by socialising
Stuart Blair — investment bank
Mike Feathers — object mentor in US
- travelling coach
Rachel Davies — independent coach
- often working with several companies at one time
- facilitating retrospectives: ensure voices are heard in a neutral way before jumping to solutions
Discussion
The focus of the group seemed to be of within large corporations rather than smaller companies working with other companies.
Politics:
- covert action to get what you want from scarce resources
- decision making process not clear — individual roles not well defined
Good politics:
- Aligning projects with high-ups objectives
- Finding right person to present the case on your behalf
- Externally, this would be called sales; but internally called politics…
- Try reframing their goals in a more positive way
- At least lets you work with them
- When you catch yourself saying bad things about another, it’s time to stop and step back
- Having a strong manager who can recognise political games and call people on it
- We often assume intentions
- Selling the success of the project within the organisation
- We find it hard to celebrate success
Bringing politics into our practices:
- We don’t really have a lexicon for political behaviour…
- Need a rudimentary politics for software developers
- Getting to Yes — by Roger Fisher (from Harvard Law School)
- also others in series (Getting Past No, etc)
- Can we have a patterns book for politics…?
- De-politicising a situation:
- Listening
- System thinking — showing how things all fit together
In any group have a tension between wanting to belong to a group and wanting to be an individual
Dealing with customers who play games?
- Build a relationship with them
- Delivering to 11 countries
- Turned up in Austria — greeted on front door of building: you’re here to implement a system that means the office will be run from London; go away
- Had to do a sales job; had to get sponsor on phone to convince him
- Very difficult to build a relationship with someone when hiding something
- Can bank integrity in relationship
- Ask questions of everybody in the company
- Find different points of view
- Understand perspective of lots of different people
How do we get recognition within hero-based culture?
- Always have to sell success (even if not being massively successful)
- what we are delivering is useful, provides value, ready on time
- some clients have culture of celebration when a project is completed
- agile projects release often and regularly
- need to celebrate that
- tie in to business successes
- hold an end of year retrospective
- show off all that has been achieved
- lots of issues overcome, just not by panicking
- hero culture can cause problems — expose the problems and compare with smooth delivery
- make time to be seen to be doing a good job — and build that in to project planning
- regular show and tell
What to do when gantt chart and burn down chart start to disagree?
- agile bubble in a non-agile company
- often pressure for report comes from middle management: just query with higher management
- use extra features and benefits of agile methods to sell
- if the agile project is the first to report that it’s running late…?
- be honest — hard conversation early on (risk of getting fired)
- speak their language (e.g. use gantt chart)
- that’s the project manager’s job
- it’s going to be late or you can have this instead
- saying “no” in a way that can be accepted
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