Exclusive Trusted Magazine Q&A with Christophe Addinquy, Coach Agile.
How could you describe your career path in a few words?
I have been a computer hobbyist since I was a teenager, but I started as a geologist back in the late 80s. I then moved to a developer career in the early 90s. My journey in IT gave me the opportunity to work in many different roles in IT and management, from developer to business unit director, but also as an analyst, CTO, trainer, and of course, agile coach. I'm an early agile adopter. Since 2001, and thanks to the variety of my roles, I consider agile from a systemic viewpoint. This means achieving goals in an agile way not only includes agile and DevOps practices, but may also be connected to business considerations, individual motivations and psychological safety, architecture, management, and organization.
How do you think agile practices have transformed companies over the past two years?
This is a two-fold consideration. For early majority companies, the shift was either toward product development rather than project management. This means a more user-centric approach and a focus on discovery over delivery. The principles of feedback, adaptation, and collaboration with the client fit perfectly with this goal. For these companies, the move may be toward so-called agile at scale. It helps a lot to spread the transformation from teams to agile teams. On the other hand, it's not always convergent with a product approach when teams lose a part of their autonomy in backlog management. Similarly, because the agile framework is reaching the organizational level, the focus shifts from 2-week cycles to 2-month cycles, slowing down the feedback loop. For late majority companies, they enjoy the incremental approach with more frequent milestones and appreciate less risky project management, with schedules and budgets more under control. Having so many agile early majority companies as examples helps them adopt this new way of working. However, these companies often struggle to give real autonomy to the teams, as it's not part of their culture.
What successful cases of agile transformations have you had the opportunity to observe that have particularly stood out to you?
I was lucky enough to be part of several agile transformations. My top three cases are: Early in my agile journey, I embraced Extreme Programming with my team in a financial organization. We mostly did it under the radar, because at that time agile development was mostly unknown in France or considered as a non-serious geek practice. We dramatically shrank the delivery time of new pricings; the traders enjoyed that a lot and, in some cases, adapted their own practices to take advantage of it. In a 100+ year-old SMB company, we moved to agile at the organizational level. It was a huge cultural challenge, spreading to sales, scientific, and marketing departments, for instance. In the end, we delivered new products and reached new markets we hadn't imagined a few years before. My third case is also the largest one, in the energy industry, on a multi-billion euro project. The sense of urgency was through the roof, with deadlines considered unreachable when I came aboard. Unlike transformation plans that last months or even years, we did it very fast—less than one month for several hundred people. We learned a few important lessons: keep the organization and process as simple as possible and be bold about it. Basic practices have the most profound effects. Finally, the success of an agile transformation relies on people more than anything else.
Will agile practices continue to generate interest? What challenges do you see in the context of deploying these practices?
Agile, in general, is much less of a topic than it used to be. By itself, this is a good thing because agile is a means, not the goal. Organizations tend to focus on the product side, on usage and impact, which is good. The drawback is, unfortunately, much less attention to agile practices. The words still stick, but User Stories may look like tasks, continuous integration is sometimes not so continuous, and test-driven development gives way to ad hoc after-the-fact testing. Generating interest in excellence in these basic, impactful but not very directly rewarding practices is much harder with the late majority population than it was for the early adopters. The latter were naturally motivated, curious, and seeking excellence and continuous improvement. The former are looking for management approval but rarely for excellence and improvement for themselves. We now face the challenge of generating interest, motivation, and willingness to engage with agile practices in the right way. Mastering them is fun, and a significant part of our job today is to help product teams see it that way.