Culture impacts all areas of our lives. Some are obvious such as religion, family values. Many, however, fall below the radar but still have lasting effects. In this article we will look how you could create an alignment between your organisational culture and the Agile framework you choose to adopt.

What is Culture?

I don’t think you can go far wrong with William Schneider’s definition of Culture: How we do things around here to succeed.

Schneider describes four distinct cultures summarised below in his model, as illustrated by Michael Sahota in his book ‘An Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide’.

I’ve been carrying this bit of paper around in my bag for about six months. It’s a scribble I drew once while on one of ‘those’ conference calls. You know - the one where someone is talking and you are not entirely sure why you are dialled in, let alone why you are attempting to listen.

At the time I was trying to work out a simple way of showing different Agile adoption approaches and how they can so easily go awry.

So what in the world does this scribble show?

This is a blog post by Andy Hiles, adapted from his article originally published on InfoQ.

Water-Scrum-fall is a hybrid software development approach that aims to successfully combine Waterfall and Scrum approaches into a hybrid Agile way of working. This blog post takes a closer look at how Water-Scrum-fall originated, what benefits and disadvantages it brings to an organisation, and why ‘doing’ and ‘being’ Agile are two completely separate things.

Using Lean, Kanban and TameFlow to Seed Change in a Traditional Organisation presented at London Lean Kanban Day in London April 2014

Here we have an excellent presentation from Dragan Jojic, Alex Gray and Steve Tendon where they talked through the interventions used at William Hill Online. Using a balance of Lean, Kanban and TameFlow to Seed Change in a Traditional Organisation and to maintain that chance using a Pragmatic Agile approach that "One size doesn't fit all".