Dr.
Dave:

So
I sent you a few questions today. Let’s just begin. Let’s start talking
about, tell us about your role in Agile Fluency, and the Agile Fluency model.
What is, yeah.
 

Diana:

Well,
so I’m a co-creator, co-developer of the model. James Shore and I a number of
years ago were noticing that it seemed like our experience of agile with our
clients was not the same as what other people were experiencing. There was an
awful lot of conversation about, “You’re agile or you’re not”. It
was very binary. Very black and white.
 

Diana:

That
just wasn’t the way we were working with clients, and it wasn’t what we were
seeing, in terms of outcomes. Successful outcomes with clients. It needed to
be much more nuanced than that. We also were noticing that clients in
different industries, different domains, had different needs. So we started
working on defining those, and iterated on that by taking it to our local
Agile Open Conference year after year. Going away and doing some work on it,
and asking for reviews from some other folks that, we respected their
perspective and thought they could give us good feedback.
 

Diana:

After
about three or four years, we had the model, and our thinking about the
model, to a place. Where when we talked about it to people, they said,
“Yeah”. That that fit for them too. That that’s what they were
experiencing.
 

Diana:

Then
we took some time and wrote it up into an article, and sent that around to a
bunch of folks. We did a lot of research and iterating on this. Sent that out
to a bunch of folks. One of the folks that we sent it to was Martin Fowler.
We asked for feedback. Did how we had written about it still describe what we
had told them it was before?
 

Diana:

Then
also, if they thought it was … Did they think it was ready for publishing?
If they did, where should we think about finding a place to publish it?
Martin Fowler came back to us and said, “Well, I think it’s ready, and
I’d like to publish it”. So we did not feel like turning that down. That
seemed like a pretty good opportunity to us. He has a broad readership on his
online presence.
 

Diana:

We
worked with him to get it up in time for the 2012 Agile Conference. Then we
thought we were done with it, pretty much. But we started, after several
months we started hearing about some stories, about how people were using the
model. Then we also started getting some questions about, “Well this is
great, and this model makes a lot of sense. But how do we operationalize it?
How do we actually use it to help improve our companies, and so on?”.
 

Diana:

Then
we started creating some additional materials, to go with the model. To help
people answer those questions. After a couple of years, it became clear that
what we needed to do was form an organization around it. So we formed the
Agile Fluency Project as a startup business, basically.
 

Diana:

Then
because we had been hearing from so many people, and using it as our own
thought process when we went into clients, a little more than a year ago,