Over these years I’ve had a growing suspicion that has turned into a certainty that the success of Agile adoption efforts was not primarily based on the practices, and over time, not even the “team”. I’ve come to believe that the number one reason for the success of any Agile adoption effort are the individuals, their skills and their personalities. All other aspects of Agile adoptions – that is the teams and their “gelling”, and the software development practices themselves are of secondary and tertiary importance. This does not mean they are not important – they are – but they are not primary. I’ll go further by saying that Agile was so successful in the early days because it self-selected individuals with the proper skill set and pushed them to grow these skills.

This is a short talk. It will be more of a survey than a tutorial. I plan to present a few models quickly and use them to pose questions and make simple, but important observations on the importance of the individual and why, if that breaks down, the teams/organization will never reach hyper-productivity and find themselves stuck at ‘sucking less’.

These are a few of the models that I will go over in the first 45 minutes:
* Alistair Cockburn’s Software Dev as a Cooperative Game
* Learning is a Bottleneck of Software Engineering
* Agile methods are Empirical Processes
* The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition (and how it applies to context and the ability to be truly Agile)
* Learning as an iterative activity
* The Alignment trap (see the Agile Journal, Feb edition - Requirements Come Second by Allan Kelly)

In the second 45 minutes I’ll delve into the more uncomfortable (touchy-feely) individual skills and why they matter to successful (not just not-sucking) Agile teams, and by extension, organizations:
* Individual Responsibility (ala Christopher Avery’s model)
** Teams and In-Between Problems
** Breakthrough’s Happen in Spurts - (be patient)
* Clarity
* Context - when you are and are not qualified to ‘put things in context’ (and second order incompetency)
* Communication - rules of thumb for effective communication
* Patience and Discipline (the broken windows metaphor)
* Learning and strong emotion - be passionate/ find passion
* Self-knowledge and reflection (personal retrospectives)

I’ll conclude (given the time left, which usually isn’t much given my style of presentation and open conversation with attendees) with a list of references and places to go learn more.

As you can see, there are a myriad of topics and therefore this will be reminder, review, and session to help people realize the importance of refocusing on the individual.