So you want to be a consultant.  You probably think this will involve yourself talking and your client respectfully listening.  Your client will put you in front of her team to present a PowerPoint deck outlining how Everything Will Be Different Now.  You will then distribute copies of your Initiative Plan to each of her subordinates.  Once you have given everyone their marching orders, they will do exactly what you outlined in orderly fashion.

But just to make sure, you personally will visit offices in New York, London, Paris, Milan, and Tokyo to double-check that everyone is doing what they should.  You will shop in Rome, buy gadgets at the Seattle Space Needle, have some fabulous meals along the way, and you will reach 1K Status this year.  That is why you want to be a consultant--you want to be consulted!

Not so fast, El Guapo!  Overbearing, meddling, quick to take offense and quicker to offend:  you aren't James Bond.  You are everyone's...mother in law.  Yes, even if you are a guy.  Guys are the worst mothers in law.

http://www.bizcrecise.com/lifestyle/what-your-mother-in-law-is-trying-to-tell-you/

<more>

"Oh for goodness sake, you put it in upside down!"
"I'm sorry, Secret. I thought the pointy end went in first."
-Secret Squirrel and Morrocco Mole, Secret Squirrel

I'm always excited to learn something new, and this week a colleague introduced me to the "Lead/Lag" concept of measuring the performance of a change program such as an agile transformation.  He also introduced me to the "Secret Squirrel (and Morocco Mole)" Hannah-Barbera cartoon series from the 1960s, which briefly seemed to be a more interesting thing to discuss, but I'm pretty sure you guys should all pursue that on your own without further commentary from me.  We agilists are a fun bunch.

<more>

I got a tweet this morning about a rival vendor's "State of Agile Development Survey" in which the re-tweeter used hashtags like #shocking and #fail.  Looking for a good laugh, I clicked on over to the survey, and realized I #liked the survey and I thought it was #interesting and #helpful to me.  I didn't find anything that jumped out to me as a #failure in a particularly #horrifying way.  Then for a moment I thought maybe I am not one of the #Agile Cool Kids.  Of course the moment was brief and I bounced back quickly--please don't worry.

<more>

Agile purists will be frightened to learn that in many enterprise environments, an early step to an agile rollout may be to establish an official agile SDLC process, and to post a diagram representing the process, along with its artifact templates, in some prominent place on the company web site.  There will be 3-D box diagrams and arrows on it for sure, along with many links and appendices.  The diagrams and artifact templates themselves will go through weeks or months of review before central posting, not to mention what will theoretically happen if your project adheres to the highly edited result.

<more>

In the glory days when giants still walked the earth and the Agile Founding Fathers created "the team," they decreed that there would be three "team roles:"

• The Product Owner
• The Scrum Master
• The Team