Chickens, Pigs, Piglets, and Chigs?

[David A. Bulkin]

Although many don’t like it, all agilists are familiar with the chicken and pig joke that explains that pigs are committed to success, while chickens are at best involved. As we continue to move to larger scale enterprise agile, we can benefit from understanding varying levels of participation and commitment. As such, I use terms like piglets and chigs to describe patterns and anti-patterns of team participation.

Piglets are part time participants that view their role as making a project successful, and act accordingly, despite their part time participation.

Chigs on the other hand, are individuals who look and act like chickens, but whom should really be pigs or piglets. Chigs are often worse then chickens as they frequently focus on finding problems and derailing the project instead of helping the project succeed.

If you want a better understanding of the Chigs anti-pattern, and what you can do about it, click here to go to the full blog article.