KnolShare with Dr. Dave

KnolShare with Dr. Dave


EAFH23: Delivery Value with Diana Larsen, Agile Fluency Model EAFH23: Delivery Value with Diana Larsen, Agile Fluency Model

January 24, 2020

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,