Gemba's Approach

Agile looks easy, but turns out to be hard!

Scrum and Agile development turn out to be much harder than we anticipate. Teams unfamiliar with the true nature of Agile development try to implement the practices, but often fail to gain meaningful results. As a result, confidence, enthusiasm and support wanes. Stakeholders who have been sold on the idea that Agile will solve their problems discover that it mostly exposes them. When extended parts of the organization work in a different (i.e. non-agile) manner, their lack of support pulls the adopting team back to old behavior. Some people in the organization may lack the training, coaching, involvement and motivation to get behind Agile. Others misunderstand it or feel exposed by working in such an open style. Pockets of resistance emerge.

Distributed teams (sites) compound the difficulty of learning and adopting a highly collaborative style of work. Teams often drop or irreparably alter the implementation to accommodate the challenges of geographic distribution, and dilute the effectiveness of the agile development. Stakeholders and management, programmed by years of conditioning, insist on fixed scope and fixed deadlines, making absolute predictability the only acceptable answer. Some teams lack the ability or permission to self- select their own work norms. Some stakeholders lack the empowerment to adjust the priorities and scope of project requirements. The net result is considerable difficulty in implementing something that appears, on the surface, to be simple.

Our Approach - Managed Adoption

Gemba Systems provides a systematic approach to help large organizations adopt agile development effectively. Our Managed Adoption program (MAp) does away with ad-hoc, IT-only coaching and replaces it with a methodical and holistic managed transformation that ensures that you get better results from product development; not just a different methodology.

Each team member receives periodic one-on-one coaching and mentoring from a Gemba coach. Our coaching is combined with brief, just-in-time training workshops to introduce new skills when you're ready to apply them. We coach and guide the project stakeholders and line management to create awareness and pull from the extended community that surrounds your project teams.

Where other coaches often engage only the project/IT team, Gemba carries learning and change beyond the project team. We actively teach and coach the extended stakeholders and management to enable cooperation from the parts of the organization that can make or break a a project.

We ensure that everyone in your organization takes ownership of your shared objectives by teaching the skills, motivation and behavior of Personal Agility.