These famous and impactful words came from Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 during the country’s biggest financial crisis in history. Today, his words have even more meaning than ever before.
Skip ahead 76 years and our nation is feeling that same fear all over again. We’re fearful for our jobs, our well-being, the unknown.
Fear is also a common theme in business. Have you ever felt blocked on your projects? Unable to move forward in your job? For most people, what’s standing in their way is FEAR. Fear of failure. Fear of looking bad. Fear of looking like they don’t know what they’re doing.
AND, the more people focus on this fear, the more it paralyzes them. While it is important to be aware of the realities around us, we can’t let them be the driving factors of our actions. You must focus on where you want to go, not what could go wrong along the way.
This is is where true leadership comes into play. You’ve got to do what others are unwilling to do. Not unable, but unwilling to do. And you will need courage for this, because it may not just be a scary place, it’s a place you’ve never been.
Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of ‘you can’t’ once and for all.” - Vincent Van Gogh, October 1884
Go forward this day, this week and this month with courage in your heart, and be willing to take on the impossible. Remember, ‘you can’.
Last night’s Bootstrapping an Agile Team event was a great success with huge community turnout and engaging presentations by Christophe Louvion (Gorilla Nation), Scott Downey (MySpace) and George Shiltz (Big Visible). Event brainchild Amanda Ablelove described moderator Tony Wong as “a rockstar…he kept everyone in check and the audience involved, with a fine hand on reality.”
The presentations all shared a common thread and exposed the hard cold truth of projects: sometimes Scrum Fails.
AND, it can be HUGELY successful. Each presenter went on to give his opinion on how successful projects are won. Christophe placed emphasis on tracking metrics. Scott’s belief lay in the importance of goal setting. And George reminded us not to discount the amount of effort that needs to be exerted on change management.
Digital Onion recently published a real world one-pager on just this topic. Our answer to producing successful projects? LEADERSHIP. Read more over at our Case Studies or download the one-pager.
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We’ll leave you with this promo video from the event last night – Scrum Club’s first ever scrum-produced video. Enjoy!
Lately there has been a lot of discussion around scrum and failure. What was once seen as the saving grace of software development is now showing similar signs of failure as its waterfall predecessor. A survey conducted by Ambysoft in 2007 showed that 71.5% of Agile projects were successful as compared with 62.8% of waterfall projects.(1) This 8.7% difference is a much smaller margin than the 54.8% increase in success that was heralded by the original implementation of scrum over waterfall.(2)
Digital Onion is one of a minority that continues to experience great success in Scrum. In 2008, its engagements succeeded 80% of the time; an 8.5% margin over average Agile projects and a 17.2% margin over waterfall projects.
So, what allows some companies to experience continued success in scrum while others to fail? Digital Onion thinks it has found the answer.
Many companies we see today are implementing the mechanics of Scrum because most of the training out there only describes Scrum as a basic framework for success. What’s missing is the underlying principle of leadership. In his book “Agile Project Management with Scrum” Ken Schwaber even admits that “it’s not always easy to understand the role of the ScrumMaster.”(3) This leads us to believe that there is something more than just going through the motions of scrum.
Digital Onion’s Point Man Leadership System™ bridges the gap that companies are discovering between Scrum mechanics and successful projects. It recognizes that there is more to successful projects than procedures, and provides the missing ingredient for YOUR PROJECT SUCCESS.
