I recently had occasion to speak to a good friend about the
state of agility in general and the needs he was looking at in his
organization. This brought me to the question – what is your biggest
problem and how are you trying to address it? The answer surprised me a little
– because I have dealt with it before. He was looking at the integration of the
“last piece” of the IT structure. How do we get the mid tier and back end IT
support groups into the Agile umbrella? If I recall my mythology correctly, the hydra is a dragon
like monster with many heads – and when you cut one off, two heads grow in its
place. I find this an ideal metaphor for transformations, because it seems just
when you identified and resolved a core issue – you have two more issues take
its place. The challenges I face are always interesting, but they seem to
circle around three “heads” – management misalignment of expectations, team
misalignment of expectations and product team involvement. I have dealt with
all three of these recently, and have realized that any one of these can “kill” a coach
immediately.
