Dahlia Season Consulting

Agile isn’t dead. Waterfall isn’t dead. Everything that has existed is existing and moving forward in a sad, middling way, as always. 

What’s alive and thriving? Chaos. 

This chaos shows up in so many ways…

• The waste of creating a product that customers don’t want. 
• The lost opportunity of not knowing what’s going wrong until it’s too late to make a different choice.
• The futility of pivoting your product development teams to a new, shiny object every month.
• The confusion of team members looking at each other on a zoom call, unsure of what to work on today.
• The frustration of doing the same work that another team is doing because you don’t know how to communicate across teams and departments.
• The disaster of writing code so unfit for use that it costs a company obscene amounts to fix it.
• The disappointment of building a product that never gets to a customer.

Sometimes chaos is masked as Waterfall, or Scrum, or Lean, or Scrumban, or Scrumfall, or whatever you want to call it.

It’s painful. It’s frustrating. And it can be difficult to know how to move out of chaos into something that really works. Into a situation where you have clarity, structure, purpose, direction, knowledge, transparency.

I’ve worked with many companies that were wandering around in a swirl of chaos. For each organization the path we walked to get to a better place was unique. Some took small steps and others great leaps, but all were able to foster positive change. 

The more painful the chaos is, the more willing people are to do the hard work of trying something different.

What hurts the most where you are right now?