What is Agile
Today you cannot open an IT magazine, blog or paper and Agile will be mentioned. Agile is the Buzzword of the day. Agile is “Hot”. Everybody wants to be “Agile” all companies are implementing “Agile” way of working.
Interestingly when you ask people what Agile is, what it means to them, where it come from nearly nobody can give you a straight answer. You will get answers like “It is delivering without rules and planning” “It is fully flexible” “The team decided everything”.
To add to confusion, within project teams the term “Agile” is used to justify anarchy, lack of planning, lack of reporting and lack of control. How often didn’t you hear a project team member reply; “We cannot deliver this because we are working Agile” or “We do not have a plan as we are working Agile and you don’t plan ahead within an Agile way of working”. Just to hide the fact they did not do their job?
As obviously working Agile is not a synonym for a total lack of planning, reporting or anarchy what is Agile, working Agile and where does it come from?
Until recently, Agile was seen as a set of management practices relevant to software development. The focus of software development was logically created, due to the fact that Agile’s initial advocates were software developers. The first known Agile methodologies foundation document was the “Manifesto for Software Development” of 2001. When we now fast forward Fifteen years, in 2016 and after recognition by Harvard Business Review, McKinsey & Company and the 2015 Learning Consortium Project, Agile and the Agile way of working is now spreading rapidly to all parts- and all types of organisations. Far beyond the initial focus of software development.
This process in emergence as a huge global movement extending beyond software development is mainly driven by the discovery that the only way for organisations to cope with today’s turbulent customer-driven marketplace is to become Agile. Becoming agile enables organisations to master the need for continuous change. It permits organisations and teams to flourish in a world that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
1. The Evolution Of Agile
The Agile Manifesto of 2001 reflected the views of visionary software developers who believed that "uncovering better ways of developing software" would require a reversal of some fundamental assumptions of 20th Century management. They valued
“individuals and interactions over processes and tools
“working software over comprehensive documentation”
“customer collaboration over contract negotiation”
“responding to change over following a plan.”
Also implicitly embedded in the Manifesto a new set of questions was found:
“What if we could create workplaces that drew on all the talents of those doing the work?”
“What if those talents were totally focused on delivering extraordinary value to the customers and other stakeholders for whom the work is being done?”
“What if those receiving this unique value would be willing to offer generous recompense for it?”
“What would these workplaces look like?”
“How would they operate?”
“How would they be reconciled with existing goals, principles and values?”
“Could they operate at scale? If so, would the answers have implications for all organisations, not just software development?”
In 2001, no one really knew the answers to those questions. Teams of software developers began trying to find some of the answers through experimenting. As with anything new, things proceeded in fits and starts, with frequent setbacks. Many variations in practices were explored. Even when the practices were in essence the same, the approaches often had different labels. The initial experiments were with single teams. As some of these experiments succeeded, the experiments expanded to groups of teams and eventually very large scale implementations, even whole organisations and into other sectors such as manufacturing.
In those times and for some years, it was hard to make sense of what was going on. Even some of the initial supporters and advocates, who embraced Agile saw agile as playing a limited role, mainly in simple software activities in small units or organisations where reliability was not an issue. Many teams and organisations that claimed to be Agile were Agile in name only. Some even suggested that Agile, as it expanded beyond individual software development teams, would inevitably mutate into traditional hierarchical bureaucracy in order to achieve efficient, reliable management at scale, like all the other well-known project and organisational management structures.
However over time it became clearer and clearer what was working and what wasn’t. As a result, there came to be a striking convergence toward a family of goals, principles and values that were demonstrably more productive and responsive to customer needs than traditional management.
As the Agile methodology and principles are increasingly applied to large scale projects, the gains that become possible at organisation are huge, particularly the ability to deliver instant, friction less, personalised responsiveness at scale, such as Spotify’s Discover Weekly.
2. Senior and Operational Management Embraces Agile
As The IT landscape, The IT processes and software itself becomes more and more a critical driver in almost all businesses, “being Agile” is now spreading to every kind of organisation and every aspect of work, as recognised in 2016 by the citadel of general management—Harvard Business Review—with its article, “Embracing Agile,” by Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland and Hirakata Takeuchi.
“Now agile methodologies—which involve new values, principles, practices, and benefits and are a radical alternative to command-and-control-style management—are spreading across a broad range of industries and functions and even into the C-suite. National Public Radio employs agile methods to create new programming. John Deere uses them to develop new machines, and Saab to produce new fighter jets. Intronis, a leader in cloud backup services, uses them in marketing. C.H. Robinson, a global third-party logistics provider, applies them in human resources. Mission Bell Winery uses them for everything from wine production to warehousing to running its senior leadership group.”
The centrality of Agile for general management was even further recognised in April 2016, by McKinsey & Company with a Global Agility Hackathon involving some 1,500 participants online:
“Becoming an agile organisation is an increasingly urgent necessity for companies in today’s digital economy, yet most companies have a deeply embedded command organisation architecture and culture. This reflects, first and foremost, the industrial economy mind-sets and skills of their senior leaders, which is arguably the greatest obstacle to becoming an agile organisation… To make the transformation, senior leaders must learn and practice a holistic and complete set of new mind-sets and skills, and apply them to design a wholly new, agile organisation architecture and culture.”
3. The Learning Consortium And Agile
The ever increasing interest for Agile used for general management was once more confirmed by the findings of the 2015 Learning Consortium Project, This Learning Consortium was a group of organisations including Microsoft, Ericsson, CH Robinson, Magna International, Riot Games, and Scrum Alliance that tried to figure out to see what is actually happening in organisations that said they are practising Agile management and related management practices such as Lean. They were also trying to figure out the conflicting claims as to whether Agile is something real or merely a management fad that is all talk only. The Learning Consortium Project sought to find out what is actually happening on the ground in the heart of the organisations.
These site visits showed that in some cases Agile was indeed no more than talk—all show, no go. Even though managers in those organisations claimed to be Agile and even implemented some of the agile practices, the organisation itself was still functioning as a top-down bureaucracy. In other cases however, the site visits showed that some major corporations had large-scale implementations of agile goals, principles and values. In effect, as the report points out, Agile at scale was already really out there. It was really happening.
4. Mind-sets And Individuals Over Tools And Processes
Over time a great deal has been written about Agile. A lot of that writing is centred on things — for example tools, processes, methodologies, technologies, platforms, big data and other topics like these.
While the 2015 Learning Consortium Project found that these things are important, people are found even to be more important—the goals that people aspire to, the mind-set through which they understand how the world works, the way they work together, the values that they share, and manner in which they communicate with each other.
As the Agile Manifesto itself states literally, individuals and interactions are valued more over the tools and processes they use. Without the proper Agile mind-set, tools and processes achieve little and will not work.
5. A Different Concept of an Organisation
Why is Agile so difficult for some managers to grasp? Why is there so much mystic and even aversion against agile? The fact that makes Agile difficult for some managers to grasp is that it’s not just a methodology or process that can be implemented within an organisations current assumptions. The Agile way of running an organisation redefines the very concept of a “corporation” that has prevailed for the last hundred years.
Instead of a corporation being conceived as an efficient steady-state machine aimed at exploiting its existing business model, the Agile organisation is a growing, learning, adapting living organism that is in constant flux to exploit new opportunities and add new value for customers.
Instead of power trickling down from the top, Agile recognises that the future of a firm depends on inspiring those doing the work to accelerate innovation and add genuine value to customers. It recognises that enhancing the capacity of those doing the work depends on giving autonomy to self-organising teams within broad parameters of control. It values transparency and continuous improvement ahead of predictability and efficiency. It recognises that open interactive conversations are more valuable than top-down directives. It stops doing anything that is not adding value to the ultimate customers. It realises that the key to success is not to do more work faster. The key is to be smarter by generating more value from less work and delivering it sooner.
Agile obliterates the traditional management distinction between exploitation and exploration. When Agile is done right, all parts of the organisation are continuously exploring how to add more value to customers. This not only creates meaning for those doing the work and delights those for whom the work is done: it results in generous returns to the organisation itself.
Agile is a time boxed, iterative approach to software delivery that builds software incrementally from the start of the (any delivery, business, improvement, manufacturing) project, instead of trying to deliver the whole outcome all at once near the end. Every iteration results in immediate added value for the customers.
To me, Agile is a genuinely better way to run a company and an economy—better for those doing the work, better for those for whom the work is done, better for the organisation itself. Instead of management extracting value from the firm, Agile generates value for customers and for society as a whole.
As mentioned before, a good Agile tram consists of people with the right mindset, rather then people who have taught themselves a skill. Having said this, let’s have a look at this so called “Right Mindset” and find out what it is all about.
To put it all in perspective it is now good to understand what the “old way” of managing projects looks like or also known as the waterfall method