Prescriptive agile?

When working with new teams there's always a "learning curve" we all have to climb. So I tend to use the phrase "prescriptive start" when working with new teams. It's my way of letting a team know we're going to start with a small set of things the team must do. It's the basics and it will get us started. We can't learn a hundred new things, so let's start small. Let's get going and not try to boil the ocean.

Is it ok to call any form of agile prescriptive?

Definition: Prescriptive - giving exact rules, directions or instructions about how you should do something - from Merriam-Webster dictionary

Scrum lays out a specific set roles, events, artifacts and rules that bind them together. The Scrum Guide is only 16 pages, as compared to some other approaches. I know, I know:

• We do Scrum, but we don't find much use in having a retrospective... 
• We do Scrum, but we don't meet daily instead we meet on Tuesday and Thursday.
• We do Scrum, but...

You can find the full description in the The Scrum Guide.

If you are doing Scrum and not some variation of Scrum, but, then you know there are set of specifics that are part of Scrum. If you're not doing the basics you're doing "Scrum, but."

Agile - now, for later

If you read my last blog you'll know that I pulled a card from a deck of 52 cards my wife has. I then decided I would try it again to see if the card provided impetus for this blog. Here's what the next card had on it: "Now or Later - If you desire a glorious future,, transform the present - Patanjali (circa: 2nd century CE). Living in the Moment by Barbara Ann Kipfer (a deck of 52 inspirational cards).

Some say Patanjali was a single person, others say Patanjali was a series of people who wrote sage advise and wisdom some 5000 to 7000 years ago. I've read some of Patanjali's works and find them interesting.

Back to the card. Ok, so maybe this deck of cards is a pretty good content generator. We'll see when I pick the third card for the next blog. Who knows maybe I have 50 more blogs ready and waiting.

Agile Metamorphosis

I read the following card from a card deck my wife has, called Happiness is Living in the Moment by Barbara Ann Kipfer (a deck of 52 inspirational cards).

When I think about it, that's what I try to do with the teams and team members I work with. I'm asking them to do something different, something foreign to them. Do they understand? Are they just following instructions? Is it becoming part of them? Do they understand how things are shifting?

Agile on COTS projects (for example: Siebel)

Over the past few years I've heard people say - you can't use agile when doing a package implementation, such as Siebel. Does that make sense? Does agile work when building a Siebel CRM or Loyalty system implementation?