xpday2006: The Selling Game
Joshua Kerievsky’s Keynote was all about selling, namely selling the benefits of agile to large organisations. He made some interesting points, which I’ve captured here:
- Coaching can be repetitive and exhausing when you try to scale it up to multiple teams. There’s also issues with inconsistency and quality as different coaches issue different advice. As a solution to this Industrial Logic have started using eLearning on topics such as TDD, to help scale agile learning to large organisations. An interesting idea to get people started, although of course you can’t learn everything from a screencast!
- Metrics are a good way of answering objections to agile practices. Larry Putnam’s work has been at the forefront of this area for some time.
- Rather than selling the benefits of an agile practice, try selling the risks of not doing it.
- Try filiming the XP team at work and then showing it to the rest of the organisation to help dispel any myths and objections about XP.