Agile Enablement
I was talking to one of my friend who is big time into agile enablement. In fact I did the same for an organization as a consultant. I told my friend an analogy about how Christians sell their religion. I remember when I use to live in DC one of the Christian organization rep walked into my house and below is the conversation we had.
Rep: Can I come in
Me: You can but pls don’t take too much time (I am a huge fan of NFL and redskins game was about to start)
Rep: (after intro) “I think you are living in dark”
Me: I don’t like too much light, is the room too dark for you, I will switch on the light
Rep: No I meant about your religion
Me: (That’s all, that made the most cynical bastard in me come out.) Why do you think so, you guys light candles in front of Jesus which tells me that your god himself is living in dark and needs light. Your god shows you way with the light you have provided him (just humor guys, nothing to get offended)
Rep: That’s not the significance of lighting candles
Me: I am not interested in knowing, because the game is about to start. Take a beer, if you want we will debate after the game.
Rep: Shall I come back later
Me: Next time you come, bring a lot of cash.
Rep: Why
Me: So that you can pay me for my time.
Rep left and I watched the game. Coming back to enablement, I told my friend that agile enablement is similar to selling religion. He started laughing when I gave him a punch line, “Go Agile – Enlighten your Organization”.
At the end of agile enablement exercise, I asked the guy who paid me “do you think you are agile now” he said I am not sure. I said you need to hire me for one more month and started laughing. From that instance on I am trying to come up with a strategy to measure the quality of enablement? Working on it, hopefully will get to something soon.
My friends and I have had lot of discussions/debates about whether you need to sell a religion or not. Some of them believe that’s the problem with Hinduism. How can we, there is no process for conversion defined in Hinduism. Agile is more or less like Hinduism, “do whatever that works for you”… that said do we need to sell Agile?