I went to an interesting session that was basically a discussion of 37signals' PDF book, "Getting Real", and how people are adopting it at their companies. What was interesting to me is that the methodology described in "Getting Real" really does seem to work, especially at smaller, more close-knit companies.
One of the central questions is will this scale, to much larger companies? I related my own experience at EDS (a 117,000 person company -- the next largest company of those that were in the session was 60 people). In my view, there is a pretty real chance at getting my immediate team to adopt some of the principals contained in "Getting Real". My concern, however, is how do teams that are following the agile/getting real approach interact with teams following more "traditional" approaches. This matters, because our team is increasing its interactions with other teams within EDS, and I think this is starting to bring us down to a lowest-common denominator.
The great insight about "Getting Real" that I gleaned, however, was this quote: "the magic of getting real is agile development for the rest of the company (not just the developers)". So, I can definitely see how sending this around to the non-development layers of EDS could really help.
The book seems to be really focused on companies producing web applications, however, which I wish we had addressed in our session. But I still got a lot of food for thought, in my efforts to transform EDS into a more social company.
-Andy.
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