I’ve never read Chaos Report before, but heard a lot about it. So decided to find out what it is all about. Not sure if this is THE one, but i managed to find document with word chaos in the title dated 2010. 🙂 This was extremely interesting reading.
This document lists all typical problems projects have and explains what exactly doesn’t work. And do you really expect that “Agile” is out of the box solution for these problems?
- User involvement
Scrum and Kanban are supposed to solve this problem. But what you can notice in most cases that PO becomes a proxy for a team and users are still far away from developers and feedback is not provided.
You still need to ensure business communication (talk their language), align understanding of quality (usually it’s different for developers and users), manage expectations
- Clear business objective
The fact that your users are not close enough to your team and you don’t know what and why you are doing, most probably will lead you nowhere in a long run.
- Law of long-tailed monsterÂ
You will always build too much of what you don’t need and not enough of what you need. So you know what will happen if  you have the fastest development process in the world, but don’t spend enough time on thinking what you are doing - pile of not useful crap.
- Panda’s Law
Inaction is failure. So if you don’t know which alternative to choose don’t spend hours/days months in discussions. Take actions and learn fast.
- Law of Fools
I think you saw million of times when people are looking for a tool, not a problem’s solution, but “Fool with a tool is still a fool”. That’s why we often hear that Scrum, Kanban or whatever fails. Do you really know what problem you are solving? Do you have enough knowledge about these tools and how they should be used?
Power is not in the methodology or a process, but in an open mindset and ability to change and adapt!
You can download the document here - http://insyght.com.au/special/2010CHAOSSummary.pdf