“I said bimodal in a meeting and I feel dirty”
A bimodal cloud strategy is code for saying hybrid cloud, which is code for saying the worst of both on-premise and the cloud.
But I see a lot of agile enthusiasts who feel that agile is about an organisational attitude, rather than a project delivery method.
I agree that agile cannot deliver effectively in an organisation that doesn’t get agile, who doesn’t have the supporting structures such as procurement, IT, support, governance designed to support agile. But that doesn’t mean that everything in an organisation has to be agile.
Agile can be given just a nod to by many organisations, but equally, we have to recognise that some projects, some things that we try to achieve can be done better by traditional project management methods.
As an organisation, we might need to be bimodal, to operate in both modes, and be able to apply the appropriate governance, support and procurement models that work for the project that is underway.
This means that all of those supporting functions, from IT Hosting to legal advice, from project management to funding and finance need to be able to handle projects being delivered in different ways. Expecting everyone to show you the high level architecture and expecting both the agile project and the V-model project to produce the same outputs with the same coherence is madness.
But equally expecting every project to iterate through an alpha, beta and live phase, even a project to move to another building is equally maddening.
Be bimodal, embrace it and accept that there are multiple modes of operating your organisation. Make every part of your organisation able to accept programmes of work in either structure or format, and understand and track them appropriately.
[This blogpost is part of an attempt to blog once a day for the entirety of November (#NaBloPoMo), inspired by Terence Eden. This series of blogposts are therefore unedited and written on the day. Errors and Omissions Excepted]