Does agile work in Olympic Sports?

What happens if we use Olympic sports as example, where you start with the sport when you are young and win an Olympic medal as an adult. Does the agile approach with an MVP work?

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It’s rather easy for a child to get a football and start playing. This is a very good example of an MVP. If she have talent and a desire to train, she can play in the championships when she is grown up. Small steps to a gold medal, in an agile way.

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If your child want to win a gold medal in sailing, the stakes are a bit higher. The first boat is usually a one person sailing boot that even a child can manage. But the cost for the boat is higher than a football and the kid need additional skills like swimming. Not to forget the need for safe waters and maintenance off season.

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If you instead of thinking of buying a horse for your offspring, then you agile approach will fail big. The concept of MVP will not work as the skills to manage a horse when not riding is far more demanding than putting the shoes on a shelf after game. If you don’t have the skills to manage the horse fully, then the health of both the rider and the horse are at stake.

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This is why you have to think through the concept of what you need to succeed with a MVP.

A football works fine, a small sailing boot is on the verge of what a young teenager can manage on her own. But to buy a horse to a youngster to ride and to take care of if he or she, or the parents, doesn’t have any prior knowledge about horses is really a bad idea.

If you think that you can succeed with a digital transformation with an MVP, it’s time to re-think. It’s much more complex that taking care of a horse.

A sisyphean profession

Gerben Wierda wrote “Don’t be an Enterprise Architect” on LinkedIn. I understand his thinking as what we do is a sisyfos task.

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Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do, but you need both patience and passion to be an Enterprise Architect.

During tweenty years, there has been only a few home runs with client projects.

The biggest challenges is as always the resistance to change in the organisation and different priorities between business units.

Technology is not the problem. With the caveat that you need to understand it to know what is possible, how long time it takes and the cost.

As people in general want to do as they always done, you will not win the popular vote as you question their ways of working. This is why you need a skin thick as an elephant when it comes to critique.

If you instead take the approach to be popular, then your challenge is to get changes done, that are aligned within the company.

-Det ska fan vara teaterdirektör, skrev August Blanche i sin komedi "Ett resande teatersällskap" - 1848.

Making it more corherent

Season 8 of Architecture Corner with only female guests

Sally Bean, Soina Sharma and Petra in’t Veld Brown talks about their views of Enterprise Architecture and why there are so few female architects.

This episode was recorded at British Computer Society in London, UK

See more episodes from Architecture Corner at https://youtube.com/c/architecturecorner     

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