I’ve helped introduce more agile ways of working for a couple of years now, and I’ve always done it by working with the developers. Getting them going on technical practices seemed like a safe bowling activity to start with.

It’s worked fairly well. The biggest strength of starting this way is that a big group of people start trusting me, and that gives me some leverage into other parts of the organization. Since deep down I’m still a developer, I found that the questions that other developers fielded where manageable – it wasn’t that long ago that I asked the same questions.

I’m now helping a client introduce agile practices in the organization, and for a number of reasons, we chose to start from the management practices. We’re doing Scrum, with very few of the agile technical practices. The work is going along fine – actually better than I anticipated. It does feel uncomfortable to stay in management land and not even look at the code (for now).

We’ll see how it goes. The worst that can happen is that I learn a lot.