
Is Agile for everyone? - adambyrtek
http://www.andybrandt.net/653/is-agile-for-everyone
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frossie
I do not necessarily disagree completely, but I am a bit more optimistic about
this. It is definitely possible (I've done it) to do agile projects even when
all the team members are not self-motivated, provided there are at least one
or two alpha-geeks that are. So I don't think it is the case that you need to
stack the whole IT industry with hackers in order to have agile work.

But particularly as to this:

 _Good people tend to gravitate towards interesting projects, new languages,
challenging problems – stuff they can brag about to their peers over beer.
Many software projects don’t meet this description, but still have to be
done._

I think this is part of the problem. Structuring a project so that it _does_
have some interest to a good software engineer is one of the challenges of
managing an agile project. You would be amazed what people find interesting -
I know tons of great developers that are not new-technology- or brag-driven
(though none of them would agree to work on an "evil" project I don't think).
The trick is to get the people first, and structure the project later - which
is why this fails a lot in the real world, when personnel ramping-up happens
after the project has been defined.

