Making Hard Transitions

No matter whether you are young or old, transitioning is difficult. Moving from comfort zone to unfamiliar surroundings can be gut wrenching, frustrating and brings out personal virtues that may be viewed by some as humiliating. Looking back across my career, and many years of technology change, process introductions, I sometime bawk at things new. It really doesn't matter whether it is well endorsed, supported, promoted and the lips of everyone involved with technology... it still is something that I must absorb. My process involves understanding the roots of the technology, how it is different from what we do today. All the time, I'm thinking about how to transition from one paradigm to another. I found myself this as we moved through and around waterfall, v-model, rational unified processes, rapid application development, joint application design, and now Agile. At last I am there, some might view this as obstance, but others might have characterized this as an age related disorder. The reason why someone young is less apt to take this approach is they have little in their history and techical repository to replace something new with. The good news is that once my process has gone full circle, I am either going to solidly embrace or reject the science. In those cases where rejection has occurred it has been because a flaw(s) have been encountered in the technology. When it's been embraced, it isn't just because it's solid but also because I can help provide an answer to transition clients and friends. Transitioning is an important part of maturity and vital in full understanding of new solutions to lingering problems. I fell in love with Agile technologies in the latter part of 2006, but it took me a much longer time to fully understand the transitioning, the virtues and how to get the big bang from the framework. So although I might be viewed as a late arrival, my depth of understanding and transitioning knowledge now provides me what I need in order to be effective. For this reason, let the late arrival be a solid one, viva Agile!