Today is my last day at ThoughtWorks, it has been an intense, challenging year.
Monday I will start a new adventure at Forward, I am excited about this as much as I was to join ThoughtWorks the first time in 2006.
I will work with some very talented former colleagues and friends like Mike & Pingles and many others great guys, in a very agile/lean company, I will finally learn Ruby & Clojure and practise continuous deployment…
There’s enough good stuff to keep me busy and happy for a while!
I’ve been involved in quite some agile consulting gigs in my work life.
There’s one lesson I want to share: if you want to change an organization you have to change their company culture first.
If you are trying to employ a consultancy firm try to get ready your people to start with, avoid wasting money making sure that your employees are ready to embrace the change.
Make sure that you communicated well and straight that things are gonna change now.
If you are a consultant, make sure that you will have enough slack on the project to work on the company culture, plan, discuss with the client when and how that work will be performed.
Otherwise change won’t work: people will work in micro waterfall iterations, they will use continuous feedbacks to drive others people carriers, they will still micro manage their teams, they will eventually fail and all their effort to “change” and your effort to make them “a better” place to work for will vanish without evident benefits.
“Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it’s not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you’ve been to. I’m not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don’t have to be like anyone else. I’m walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.”
— Hugo Hamilton (The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood)
links for 2010-06-22