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Many organisations, even the most stuck-up ones (or perhaps especially those?) sometimes work in an Agile fashion.
It has been my observation, however, that they tend to do it by accident, not realising what happens.
Maybe you’ve observed this too: when a project is in sufficient distress, management decides on energic measures: they found a task force.
Experts from various disciplines get pulled into this task force, told to drop their other responsibilities, make swift decisions, and focus on working together with their colleagues to, as the German saying goes, get the cow off the ice.
If you’ve been keeping score at home, you may have noticed that this looks pretty much like what Agile practitioners suggest:
- single-piece flow
- cross-functional teams
- autonomy
And what do you know, it often works.
Of course, as soon as the immediate crisis has been defused, everybody is told to go back to their silos, myriad parallel tasks, and limited autonomy.
I wonder why it happens so rarely that organisations take a step back, look at what happens, and decide that maybe it would be beneficial to, you know, keep doing what they’ve just witnessed works.