How We Can Solve the Mounting Conflicts between Traditional and Agile Best Practices | Part 2/4

Thank you for answering the question. Could it be that the source of the conflict is now obvious? Anyhow, the following are typical reactions revealed by workshop participants and one-to-one discussions:

  • At the department level and higher, they use the working practices of the left column.
  • I work mostly with the practices of the right column.
  • Science applies the practices of the left column.
  • Health services apply the practices of the left column.
  • We need to transform organisations from the left to the right column.

When we look at best practices, it turns out that traditional best practices like Project Management, Governance and Service Management/ITIL are dominantly based on the practices of the left column. When their practices had created too much bureaucracy and had delivered insufficient results, this triggered the trend towards agile best practices such as Scrum and self-organisation. With agile best practices using the practices of the right column, it is no surprise when emotions run high.

When we put emotions aside, the following questions emerge:

  1. How do we get the proponents of traditional best practices and those of agile best practices on the same page? 
  2. When transforming an organisation from the practices of the left column to those of the right column, how do we prevent well-functioning elements of traditional best practices from being lost? Examples: protocols of emergency services in hospitals, the provisioning of passports and the operations of our bank accounts. 
Business Intelligence: Where are the lessons learned?