Adapting Agile Methodology to Overcome Social Differences in Project Members

• All Resources
• Blog
• Experience Reports
• Webcasts
• Videos
• Books
• Event Sessions
• Research Papers

Transition to becoming agile is a difficult process. This session will present our experience toward becoming an agile company. We will focus on one of our most difficult project – an off-shoring project.

Projects often consist with members with different values that may cause conflicts within the team causing decrease in members’ motivation, involvement, and cohesiveness. In our experiences with offshoring Japanese software development projects to China, we were having difficulties with low quality deliverables and high turnover rate of Chinese members because of social differences. Our attempts to create a common culture were not very successful because people in general are less likely to change their basic views and behavior in a short period of time. We, however, were able to obtain success by acknowledging that differences are going to exist and adopting and adapting agile practices in consideration of the existence of these differences.

This session will show Kaizen as is used by a Japanese company in software development. We will focus on our experiences with social differences we’ve found and how we continuously adapted practices in our project to take better advantage of the situation as relationship between members changed. It is based on our over 10 years of experience in trying to improve a software package development at a software company in China, which has now become our subsidiary. During our attempts, we have learned the importance of agile mentality in resolving social difference issues. We believe what we’ve learned in adapting agile practices is not just limited to our particular project but can be useful in agile projects in general and thus can be used to assist resolve value differences in organizations as well.