Agile Culture

Agile Development comes down to corporate culture.

For a development company to develop software with agility means the whole corporate culture needs to support it and buy into it. If the company doesn’t buy in, you will not be as successful as you can be with Agile development.

The company has to have a vision. This isn’t specific to Agile, but the product has to have a vision as well. I think this vision is often missed. The culture of the company has to believe in the product’s vision.

The corporate culture has to be based around building value for your customer (whoever or whatever that may be). We, as software companies, have to have a culture of learning and re-prioritizing each and every time we finish a chunk of work. The product owner (or whatever you call it) has to be intimately involved. They have to champion the vision and do that prioritization. The have to always focus on building value (the culture of the company needs to emphasize this). The implementation that they guide has to meet the vision for the product.

The belief in one on one communication and being a team has to be corporate wide, not just among the specific agile team. Building working software each work cycle isn’t done just to do it. It’s done so that the rest of the corporate team can see that we are building business value in support of the product’s vision. When you give a demo of the working software each work cycle, the culture has to emphasize the right people actually go to the demo. This is their time to see the vision in more than just a few words on a screen (or spoken or whatever). This sells the vision and helps sales do their part of letting engineering know whether they can sell this implementation of the vision. It is how engineering learns from each work cycle. The culture has to be such that engineering learns from and takes into account what sales is telling us. The culture has to let sales tell us why they can’t sell it and the culture of engineering has to emphasize really listening and thinking about what they are saying. The same goes for tech support and professional services. If they don’t believe they can support the product, engineering has to learn why. Sales has to believe in the salability of this vision. If sales doesn’t believe in it, you can run the perfect agile project (what does that mean really) and still fail.

The main goal of agile development is the belief that the Agile values will help you build enough business value so that you can solve a problem or sell a product to make money. I think they only way this can be done consistently and successfully is through making it part of your corporate culture.