The Chinese philosophy of yin yang represents how any given item only exists because of and in harmony with its opposite. Although not polar opposites, I like to consider agile and traditional project management methods as yin and yang, respectively. If you get a person from each side on this subject matter in the same room, and there will definitely be some opposing forces, hopefully intellectually, but usually physical, pushing against each other. As a practitioner of agile development methodologies, I recently found myself in yet another conversation with the yang. As the typical debate ensued, Mr. Yang, in an attempt to negate the effectiveness of the core concepts of agile development, proposed an interesting hypothesis: agile development methods only increase productivity because of the Hawthorne effect. Blasphemy! But is he right?

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This is part five in a multi-part series on how the federal government is implementing Enterprise 2.0.  This was done through extensive interviews with Booz Allen Hamilton who has led many of the efforts for various Government agencies. The full series on Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government (which includes additional information and specific examples) can be downloaded(registration required) for free.  I recommend that you start with the first post: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government Part One: Business Drivers, the second post: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government Part Two: Who Drives the Tools?, the third post: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government Part Three: Obstacles, and the fourth post: Implementing Enterprise 2.0 for the Federal Government Part Four: More Obstacles

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