Agile 2020 – A mindset

"Arise! Awake! And stop not until the goal is reached" – Swami Vivekananda

Agile Is A Mindset, Not A Methodology. “The highest priority,” as the Agile Manifesto states, “is to satisfy the customer.” This is a revolutionary declaration.

Agile enables organizations to cope with continuous change. It permits them to flourish in a VUCA world. As managing software becomes central to the success of most businesses, Agile is becoming a key to the management of everything.

At the first glance on the topic ‘Agile 2020’ if your perception is inclined towards the Agile ways of working in the year 2020 then you got it fully correct as well as partially correct. That’s the power of Agile. That’s accepting the many shades of Grey.

To be precise, 2020 in the topic of this article refers to the 20 points on:

 ‘What Agile prefers’ over ‘What Agile does not prefer’

1.      ‘Individuals and interactions’ over ‘Processes and tools’

Put people first, whether it’s your customer, employee or a partner in the ecosystem. Valuing people more highly than processes or tools is easy to understand because it is the people who respond to business needs and drive the development process.

2.      ‘Working product’ over ‘Comprehensive documentation’

Working product is the primary measure of progress. Agile does not eliminate documentation, but it streamlines it in a form of user stories that gives the developer what is needed to do the work without getting bogged down in details.

3.       ‘Customer collaboration’ over ‘Contract negotiation’

The Agile Manifesto describes a customer who is engaged and collaborates throughout the development process, making. This makes it far easier for development to meet their needs of the customer. Agile methods may include the customer at intervals for periodic demos.

4.      ‘Responding to change’ over ‘Following a plan’

Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. Agile teams welcome and regularly adapt to changes. They progressively discover and address customers' needs through experiments and feedback in small batches.

5.      ‘A Culture Shift’ over ‘Data driven approach’

Agile teams focus on customer value, not process bureaucracy. They achieve increments of valuable output via. regular releases for customer engagement and collaboration. Educated experiments with prototypes mitigate risks and lower overall development costs.

6.      ‘Transparency’ over ‘Ambiguity’

Agile techniques enable teams to frequently and reliably feed customer insights back into their development efforts, and vice versa. Customers are happier when they receive working software at regular intervals, rather than waiting extended periods of time between releases.

7.      ‘Adaptation’ over ‘Rework’

Agile is about working smarter, rather than harder. It’s not about doing more work in less time: it’s about generating more value with less work. Self-improvement, process improvement, advancing skills, and techniques help team members work more efficiently.

8.      ‘Gaining consensus’ over ‘Following guidelines’

Consensus decision making is a creative and dynamic way of reaching agreement between all members of a group that everyone actively supports, or at least can live with. This ensures that all opinions, ideas and concerns are considered.

9.      ‘Growth Mindset’ over ‘Fixed Mindset’

Agile mindset is to find ways to identify and seize opportunities, read environment and adapt through being curious, embrace critical thinking, adding value from the outset, and using a continuous improvement process (inspection, adaptation, and transparency).

10.  ‘Self-organizing teams’ over ‘Managed experts’

Depending on someone else’s affirmation is completely against the self-organized team theory as self-organized teams understand each other’s roles and tasks far more and rely far less on one’s skill or position in the team and share ideas that deliver quality products.

11.  ‘Micro-services’ over ‘Monolithic architecture’

An increasingly popular and successful method that embodies Agile principles is micro-services, which are self-contained components, loosely coupled and capable of being modified, tested and deployed independently of the systems that use them.

12.  ‘Fact-based decisions’ over ‘Assumptions’

To get the benefits of Agile, managers not only have to “do Agile.” They must “be Agile.” Sustainable gains only come from “being Agile,” and embracing Agile as a mindset and a culture. Anyone can follow a recipe, but a great cook has a different mindset.

13.  ‘Compassion’ over ‘Push and Pull’

Agile promotes teams’ task ownership and entrepreneurial spirit. Complex knowledge work thus becomes more experimental, flexible and rewarding. Using compassion gives you the distance from an issue, and that distance can make you a better agent of change.

14.  ‘Grow and improve’ over ‘Rules and regulations’

Agility rhymes with stability. Truly agile organizations, paradoxically, learn to be both stable (resilient, reliable, and efficient) and dynamic (fast, nimble, and adaptive). Agile embraces the ability to cut through unnecessary work and focus only on essential work.

15.  ‘Embracing challenges’ over ‘Avoiding challenges’

Reaction to challenges is resilience and not defeatism. The Agile mindset is open to challenges, and failing fast, so that improvements can be made quickly. Innovation, operational excellence and experience-centric approach is what agile is all about.

16.  ‘Learning opportunities’ over ‘Correcting mistakes’

Scrum emphasizes creative and adaptive teamwork in solving complex problems; Lean development focuses on the continual elimination of waste; and Kanban concentrates on reducing lead times and the amount of work in process.

17.  ‘Simplicity’ over ‘Time and effort’

Team members hold brief daily “stand-up” meetings to review progress and identify roadblocks. They resolve disagreements through experimentation and feedback rather than endless debates or appeals to authority.

18.  ‘Servant Leader’ over ‘Authority’

When managers truly embrace Agile, they have different goals, different ways of organizing work, a different role for management, different ways of coordinating work, different values and different ways of communicating. Agile changes the management game fundamentally.

19.  ‘Collaboration’ over ‘Competition’

In an Agile organization, self-organizing teams work in an iterative fashion with continuous interaction with users to add new value. The organization can constantly upgrade what it does for each individual user, sometimes almost in real time.

20.  ‘Principles’ over ‘Practices’

Agile practitioners share a mindset that work should in principle be done in small autonomous cross-functional teams working in short cycles on relatively small tasks and getting continuous feedback from the ultimate customer or end user.

To summarize, Agile Is A Mindset, Not A Methodology. Agile is a matter of instilling the right kinds of behavior for “how we do things around.”

Agile aligns with Peter Drucker’s foundational insight: “The only valid purpose of a firm is to create a customer.” It is the management basis for the emerging Creative Economy. It is the foundation for Continuous Innovation.

Agile is a journey. Once you think you have mastered it, something comes by that surprises you. But the beauty is in your ability to respond to it!

"The world is the great gymnasium where we come to make ourselves strong." – Swami Vivekananda

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are my personal point of view and do not in any way represent that of the organization I work for.

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