Agile enthusiasts in demand – Evolution of Job Roles?

Earlier in the summer, I was fortunate to attend The Coaching Stance workshop with Lyssa Adkins & David Darst which took place prior to the Ottawa Agile Coach Camp.  As you may know, Lyssa wrote a great book on Coaching Agile Teams. One of the topics she covers is the patterns some people have taken to become an Agile Coach.

My own Agile journey started with practicing TDD in Smalltalk over 13 years ago and there was no turning back for me as I’ve led a number of development teams – For example, as an XP Coach, Technical Team Lead, a Software Development Manager, or most recently as an Agile Process Consultant and Coach at RBC. Incidentally, RBC is hiring for some Agile enthusiasts as you can see here:  Agile Practice Lead  Head Agile CoE.

For about 5 years I had worked for a start-up where eXtreme Programming was the norm. It was refreshing to see how the organizational structure was flatter as you would expect from an XP shop where the team members worked in a collaborative, self-managing, and self-organizing manner. I was reminded of that experience when reading the following article titled: There Is No Career Ladder where it says:

“Career ladders died out during the late 1980s and early 1990s…”

It seems to me that no matter what role you are in, you have a better chance of success in terms of your career if you have an Agile mindset whereby you are continuously inspecting and adapting. I came across the following article from the Harvard Business Review Blog where it talks about: Career Plans Are Dangerous. Note it says:

“But increasingly, the world is not this predictable. And it is in settings of high uncertainty where traditional career planning is both a waste of time and potentially dangerous”

I found the article correlates with how Agile project management is adaptive (compared to the traditional project management of being predictive) and to be successful you have to treat your career in a more adaptive attitude which, to me, it means having an Agile mindset. What struck me in the article regarding the proposed steps for career success is how Agile they are… see the following:

“1. Determine your desire
2. Take a step toward it
3. Incorporate what you learn from taking that step
4. Take another step
5. Learn from that one
6. Repeat until you have a job, your own business, or have achieved your goal”

Doesn’t that sounds Agile to you? How does that compare with your transition to Agile?

3 thoughts on “Agile enthusiasts in demand – Evolution of Job Roles?

  1. Brother Siraj

    Guess who? I am sure you wont know….I met you at the training course today

    Mashallah you are a great guy…and this blog is great too….

    With Salam

  2. Excellent article. A shrewd approach to link IT experience/process to to non-IT scenarios which brings about the social aspect of computer science that is largely ignored in industry.

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