Why Gemba Systems?

The Challenge Of Agile Adoption

Scrum and Agile development practices are much harder to successfully adopt than you think.  Teams unfamiliar with the true nature of Agile development try to implement the practices, but they often fail to gain meaningful results.  As a result, confidence, enthusiasm, and support wane.  Stakeholders who have been sold on the idea that Agile will solve their problems discover that it mostly exposes the problems. Other parts of the organization work in a non-agile way. Their lack of support pulls the adopting team back to old behavior.  Some people in the organization lack the training, coaching, involvement, and motivation to get behind Agile.  Others misunderstand Agile or feel exposed working in such an open style.  Pockets of resistance develop.

Distributed teams (sites) compound the difficulty of learning and adopting a highly-collaborative style of work.  Teams drop or irreparably alter the implementation to accommodate the challenges of geographic distribution, diluting 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.

What's Different about Gemba Systems

What makes Gemba’s approach different is our focus on the development of personal collaboration skills that enable individuals to take ownership of the outcome. We call these skills Personal Agility, and we see them as the key difference between a brief flirtation with agile development and a lasting change that delivers results.

We work on the things that others won’t—to get the results that others don't.

Our unique approach to agile adoption with an emphasis on personal agility allows your people to take ownership of their shared goals. We help your people develop the courage and resolve to confront their obstacles—within themselves and others. We help participants become aware of the way they view others and subsequently how others view them.

We carry learning and change beyond the project/IT team, to enable cooperation from the parts of the organization that can make or break a project.

We create pull within the organization to make the practices sticky. As a result, your people take ownership of the outcome, and Agile development remains in practice long after Gemba Systems has disengaged.