Doing vs. Being Agile

Many teams believe they are Agile because they are following the prescribed Agile practices. E.g. A team may think they are Agile because they are doing daily stand up meetings, sprint planning meetings, retrospectives etc.

The mistake that teams often make is that they tend to treat these practices as ‘ceremonies’, thereby focusing more on getting the ‘ceremony’ done, and not so much on doing it right so as to derive the benefit that the practice is intended to provide. Take, for instance, daily stand up meetings. A team can be said to ‘be’ Agile if they can achieve the following benefits through these meetings:

• Instilling a clear sense of purpose about what needs to get done
• Focus on efficiently moving the work forward
• Early identification of risks and blockers
• Team members helping each other with share obstacles

However, many teams think they are Agile, just because they are ‘doing; stand up meetings, even when their stand up meetings are not delivering any of these benefits, or worse, have anti patterns.

Doing Agile practices does not translate into being Agile, unless there is focused effort put in by all team members to derive the intended benefits from that practice. Teams need to be conscious about why they are doing a practice and should aim to keep improving the maturity level of that practice.

To state in other words, treating Agile as a noun is futile. Teams are Agile only when they understand that Agile is an adjective and constantly work towards it and also adopt the Agile mindset. The mindset change is required to make the transition from just ‘doing’ Agile to ‘being’ Agile.

Cross posted from my blog: https://suniltalksagile.wordpress.com/2012/06/