18 years of Agile Manifesto: individuals and interactions OVER processes and tools ... Are we thinking about this?

This is an English version of this article "18 anos de Agile Manifesto: indivíduos e intera??es MAIS DO QUE processos e ferramentas... Estamos pensando nisso mesmo?"

This month of February the Agile Manifesto turns 18, reaching the age of majority. The original 17 signatories were already establishing some disruptions (Scrum, XP, FDD), the RUP, although heavy, was a seed too, in the 1980s there were already initiatives and much of what is preached in agile descends from toyotism, decades behind it, so it's not a novelty, it's not a fashion or a "let's see what it's about". And even if it were this last option, it should be something very welcome, after all only break paradigms are established. Something that Jason Little addresses with the Lean Change Management cycle: insights, options, and experiments.

Some colleagues already know, because I approached them directly and / or read a publication of mine here in LinkedIn, that I have been looking for to map the "agility holes". Anyone who wants to know a little more and contribute, comments or sends inbox same, but in short: this is what you are seeing as "hmmm ... there is something to be improved here and I am not seeing anyone / so many people looking at this ".

I have something nice to write about, but I want to come up with something that has been bothering me a lot and it has to do with this value that I highlighted in the Agile Manifesto, in commemoration of his 18th birthday.

I have the impression that some people mentally (subconsciously or even consciously), in a sign of total agreement with this value, say a little more "TRADITIONAL processes and tools", but are totally ignoring agile itself.

What do I mean by that?

People, individuals and interactions OVER processes and tools, INCLUDING agile. If you're more concerned with the "implementation" of method X, tool Z, or framework U, and are totally ignoring people, interaction, face to face, coffee talk, support, coach, psychology , humanity and, increasingly, diversity, so I feel that failure will come very soon.

And a little parenthesis, totally unfair to the theme, because it deserves much more clarity and exposure, but I think I'm not the most appropriate person for it, after all, the "place of speech" (I don't know if the term is right in english, so if you don't understand please talk to me) is there to prove it: agility, in today's world, without clear, true and direct promotion of diversity, without learning to undress ourselves of diverse prejudices and to learn, as well as accept, that society tries to mold us to understand that white, young and straight man is the standard of success and if we ignore that there is a universe of people who are marginalized or excluded only by their skin color, their age, their sexuality or their gender, is very difficult. People are diverse, people deserve respect, people deserve opportunities. People. And not a group of people. All of them.

It is critical to understand that various tools, practices, frameworks and etc. are there to help empower and strengthen teams.

Obviously if you use some tools correctly these will direct you to a more effective approach to helping people.

But I'm very worried about observing attitudes more concerned with the purity of the framework than if it really suits that environment, those people and that organization. Twisted noses for adaptations, the famous and spooky term "hybrid" (booo).

It is worth emphasizing that adapting and hybridity is not going against everything you think about agility. I'm not saying that you should go into an organization with traditional practices, say "let's 'scrumity' the things here" and give in to requests to raise alllll requirements too soon, plan allllll the project, close a scope and set a deadline, just working sprints which do not lead to value increments, set up backlogs, do some retrofits and limit WIP (what's going to happen next: at some point more will end up going crazy to deliver everything, because what matters is deadline compliance and scope delivered, being an aggregator of value or not), after all "the organization is like this". I'm talking about challenging a little more, having a little more impetuosity.

Adaptation is part of agility. Pillars of the Scrum: transparency, inspection and adaptation. Again Lean Change Management: insight, option and experiment. And so it goes.

Identify people a little better unitarily, before thinking about teams. Will a certain practice work with these people in this context and environment? Yes, fundamental to seek change, disruption and transformation, after all, I step away from preaching a conformity with status quo (laughing a lot and who knows me will laugh as much as I do, after all if there is someone who is extremely restless and seek to shake somewhat the status that this is me). But include the agile itself. From the moment that something is established as truth, that it is something "unquestionable", it becomes the current status quo.

For almost a decade and a half (old is your ... hahaha) I was in an implementation of CMM (yes, without the "I" yet ...) and participated in evaluation team (a representative of the evaluated company participates in the evaluation also - the main objective is to have someone with clarity of what was done to better explain to the evaluators, since it is a maxim of these quality models to affirm that "the model says WHAT to do and not HOW").

Since then I have begun to bring with me a thought, which is more a reaction to what I see / hear / read, when someone practically declares a model, framework, practice, etc: I am afraid of anyone who knows how far the commas are...

This comes to my mind because my empiricism has shown me that people who are so preoccupied with decorating all passages invariably feel lost when something different happens. Perhaps, a small hypothesis without any scientific proof (that is, the famous kick ... hahaha), for having a formation mainly coming from graduations of the area of Exact Sciences, then ends up pursuing a search for logical results. "If I do that, it soon results in that." "That's the rule, so it has to be implemented this way." And, returning to the value of the Manifesto and purpose of this article, they are people. People are not logical in this sense, they do not follow square rules, not always if you do something will result in what you expected all the time. It is necessary to "read" people a little more, to understand their experiences (of life too, I do not only speak about professionals experiences), to perceive their realities and their ways, as well as to understand their moments a little more.

See, I'm not preaching leaders, coaches, managers and Masters to embrace trees, stop even knowing different tools or delving into those they know. My walk shows the opposite: I did a no numbers of courses, I participate in various groups, read and watch videos.

So little that no one has to worry about value delivery, proper product, time-to-market, market share, ROI, customer satisfaction and so on.

But try to do a little more what Philosophy does: ask the reason for it. And ask at least 5 times until you get to the root of the idea (yes, TOTALLY inspired by Ishikawa).

Why should a sprint have a maximum of 4 weeks? Why should WIP be limited? Ask the reason. And ask again when there is an answer. It is much more important for you to understand that the longer the time to reach a goal the less motivated people are, that the lower a sprint the better you can react and minimize the risks as well as work with products that are not yet well known, that the high work-in-progress in one phase / stage of the team will result in stockpiling in another, it will cause a difficult prioritization of what to do and people will tend to open many fronts without closing any, rather than simply "oh why the Scrum Guide and the Kanban say it is so. "

It could be that a team works very well with 12 people and in sprints of 5 weeks and 2 days for that moment, that organization, that product and those people. No one should come shouting and pointing the finger with the accusation "you're not agile" and you should split in two teams of 6 people each and decrease the sprints for 4 weeks.

It is the people who make up the teams and the teams who deliver all this, that value, the product, reach that time-to-market and so on. It's not the tools, not the processes, let alone the models. These serve to support, to help enable, but are not more important.

If the tripod of an organization consisting of people, processes, and product/s, needs to stand on all three sides, I have also seen that the "people" part is the only one that can not wobble at all. Motivated people deliver good products even with bad processes. People motives deliver less bad products, even working with something that is not there these things. Now a good product and/or a good process only, will not do results alone if people are not motivated.

People USE processes to GENERATE products.

What invariably happens is that people motivated and committed to the goal of the organization will improve bad products and define decent processes in exchange for flawed processes.

And you noticed the second point of this value? I'm not going to stretch myself ("thanks", huh?), just to point out that interactions come from interacting and this is only done with other people, not alone.

That is why we should be concerned with "individuals and interactions OVER processes and tools".

And that's also why I'm going to give a nice shot that can hit my foot because I'm looking for professional opportunities: a good leader server will be able to have more chances to be successful in your goal if you're sitting next to the people most time, coffee chatter, spend more time on chat wheels than those who are most concerned with Lead Time, Cycle Time, CFD and Throughput calculations... And again, I want to make it very explicit, I am reinforcing the idea of the four values of the Manifesto: one is MORE important than the other and not one that replaces the other. So all the metrics are very important, they give you good subsidies that "something is wrong that is not right" (foreing people: it is a kind of joke here in Brazil... We say this to reinforcing that "something is wrong" saying "that is not right"), but metrics help you and do not tell you exactly what the problem is.

Last story, I swear ... lol

After a long explanation of coach Vicente Feola for the Brazilian soccer team in 1958, before a game against the former USSR, in which he defined who would pass the ball to who, how many would be dribbled by Garrincha, that Nilton Santos would do this or that even as the first goal from Mazzola would have been made, an infallible play. When Garrincha asked, "Mr. Feola, that's all right, but you combined with the Russians?"

What this simple question has is also brilliant for our daily learning: "combine more with the Russians", who in this case are not opponents.

Before you go about defining everything that will be done and living with some BoK or Guide under your arm and declaiming passage by passage of it, seek to understand more people to combine what can work or not, interact more, think more about individuals.

Do you want to comment, do you want to disagree? Feel free!!! I am always learning, nothing I wrote is stuck in stone and, as a great friend said: who always repeats what he said is vinyl disc (yes, vinyl... I already said old is your... hahaha).

Well, I have fewer truths and more doubts ...

Thank you for the exchanges with some people who helped me with the composition of parts of this thought, great and different exchanges, from chats to courses, through apprenticeships and comments here on LinkedIn: Luis Guimar?es, Jorge Improissi, Eric Fer, Neivia Justa, Ailton Correia, Viviane Laporti, Nina Silva, Mia Kolmodin, Oscar Correia, Isabela Gayno, Amanda Reis, Diego Bonilha, Jason Little, Rodrigo Pinto and André Coelho.

#agilemanifesto18years #individualsandinteractions