What is Agile?
Simon Powers
CEO and Founder of AWA and Bryter Work. I help Leaders make the right changes. Author of the book Change and deeperchange.substack.com
Over the last few years, the word Agile (or agile with a small a) has taken on different meanings and used in multiple contexts. This is a short post to give my perspective on what Agile is.
I’m not going to bore you with the 2001 meeting, agile manifesto, or an intro to XP, Scrum or Kanban. That’s been done a gazillion times before.
Instead, I want to look at what Agile is now. And why it is hard for beginners to get their head round it.
This diagram is still the best overview I can find.
Source: Adventures with Agile training materials based on a diagram adapted from Radtac
If you were thinking Agile is a set of different methodologies for getting software built, then you are only very partially correct. That viewpoint fits well into a subset of the ‘practices’ part of the onion. But Agile is a whole lot more than that.
The larger the onion circle, the more powerful but less obvious it is. 'Tools' in the middle are really easy to see. You can see big boards with post-its or Jira instances easily. But on their own, they are pretty useless.
The 'practices' include:
- Scrum
- Kanban
- XP
- Story writing and mapping
- Prioritising
- Roadmap creation
- Beyond budgeting
- agile HR practices
- and a whole host of other things.
These practices are really easy to understand, are really hard to make stick and get any real value out them. Ever see a Scrum team doing all the meetings, using Jira, and trying really hard and not getting any value out? Chances are the team, or the organisation is missing the more important circles of the onion.
‘Principles’ are things like, 'we complete all the work we start in a sprint', or 'our highest priority is to produce working and useful software every 2 weeks'. Having these allow the team and organisation to optimise around their principles, cutting away crazy decisions like having a silo database team.
Without principles, the team will optimise around other things, such as:
- Keeping people busy
- Bowing to pressure from other sources than the PO
- Not shaping work correctly
'Values' are even more important and even more intangible. We know from ‘5 Dysfunctions of a Team’ that the first starting block for any high performing team is trust. If trust isn’t encouraged through respect and courage to speak out, which are all values, then high performance is going to be a distant concept, perhaps bringing up images of Formula One teams rather than teams at work.
Finally, the hardest for all to see, the ‘Mindset’. You can’t teach this. Or at least not directly. Some people have this naturally. Most children probably do. Sometimes, just like Zen, the Agile Mindset is obtained not by learning, but by unlearning all those layers of command and control, Theory X, and Project Management skills.
By doing and then being agile, and having the support, skills, and knowledge of those around to keep being agile, you can finally have something that works in the organisation.
It’s not to say that the smaller circles don’t add value, but they won’t add as much value as you had hoped or they won’t stick. You must achieve the cultural changes in the organisation that changing the mindset brings.
And this means:
- the exec team
- the finance office
- HR
- legal
- procurement
- and all the middle managers
- as well as the delivery teams
must make that mindset shift too.
That is what agile is. It is the change of an organisation’s culture from one place to another. That means it is changing what is in people’s heads. It changes the way we think and interact. This takes time as it’s incremental. It can’t be done all at once. This is why it takes so long. It takes time to change the way people are.
Sometimes I think that organisations which are ‘going agile’, don’t realise what they are starting.
Simon Powers is the Head of Consultancy at Adventures with Agile, focussing on leadership, transformation strategy and delivery.
Please visit our website to learn more about the work Simon Powers does at www.adventureswithagile.com
Read part 2: What is the Agile Coach? | Read Part 3: What is the Agile Mindset?
This article was first published on the Adventures with Agile blog.
Vice President Operations EMEA-APAC
6yGreat read tkx! Guess ultimately all organizations are looking at having a growth mindset in order to constantly adapt to the ever changing environments and remain successful. All starts at bottom layer where within that organization we define what workflows and practices will be put in place. This also defines most basic protocols as on using softwares such as collaborative platforms, emails and phones. 2nd step - roll out, guide, train, and most importantly monitor the results obtained. Standardize things that work in a way that are easily accessible and repeatable. Disruptors will be moved aside, the ones reluctant to change will start understanding the benefit and joining in with a less moody face! 3rd Step - the desired mindset starts emerging. Momentum to proceed in that way is supported. Why’s it easier said than done? 1. if you have an organization with existing ppl you need in most situations to ‘rewire’ each others brains, 2. Not all ppl are best asset, but the right ones are, 3. processes and practices are not fixed, constant adaptation is required and thus at that early stage you already need a group of ppl with the desired mindset in place that will than lead the rest, 4. takes a lot of energy, consistency and commitment...and avoid being deluded in thinking it can be done overnight! The rest...is simple :)
Marketing Communications Manager at Perforce Software
6yGreat article. It's definitely important for people themselves to be the initial change in making a company more agile. Your readers might find real user reviews for all the major agile development tools and how they helped these individuals achieve their company goals to be helpful. As an example, this user writes in his review of CA Agile Central, "The connection between user stories, tasks, themes, initiatives and test cases, can be easily linked together. And, it allow users to start from any level of structure. For instance, I can start at the user story level and then only go upstream to create features and link those together. The tools provide the flexibility for the user to configure any way they want based on the delivery team working mode." You can read the rest of his review here: https://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/ca-agile-central-review-42626-by-wan-jing-chew/tzd/c301-sbc-259.
Global Logistics Management & Excellence Director chez JTI (Japan Tobacco International)
6yWelcome to the nested level dimension all about oneself and others .... but it first starts with "me"
Experienced facilitator, mentor and coach
6yI really like the clarity of the article. Shows how much we need the buy-in of the key business stakeholders to make it work in the long term.
Helping US companies create robust digital products that people love.
7yThanks for sharing it! Nice perspective. I also value the importance of applying agile in a very simple and action-oriented way. Recently one of our thought leaders wrote an article about simple agile practices that we can implement in our teams to boost our agile mindset: https://blog.uruit.com/2017/04/19/shaping-agile-mindset/