Agile Is Dead?

Now that I have your attention, let me tell you, Agile is not dead!!! A couple years ago, Dave Thomas, one of the creators of the Agile manifesto, declared that Agile was dead, but it wasn’t the idea of Agile he was talking about. It was the word Agile itself.  

The core principles of Agile are still important for helping organizations deliver value more efficiently and effectively, but somewhere along the way the word Agile has become corrupt and depreciated that it causing confusion among the industry, he explained. For instance, there are no Agile programmers or Agile teams, there are programmers and development teams who practice agility, and tools that help them increase that agility.  

“Agility requires more than just having a few roles, artifacts and events. It involves actually using each of those things for a specific advantage. Most organizations seem to be going through the motions rather than understanding what truly drives effective, sustainable agility,” said Bob Hartman, founder of Agile for All, an Agile and Scrum consulting firm. “Agile is hard to do well because it requires changing the way we think and the way we do things. We do all that for a reason: to build better products or get better results. If we don’t understand how Agile principles relate to the final results then we will be stuck doing the practices and basically having the old way of work done in short increments.” 

The problem is that Agile isn’t something you do, it is something you are. It’s a mindset, according to Steve Denning, an Agile thought leader and author of the book The Age of Agile. “It is a shift in mindset from a top-down bureaucratic hierarchical approach to a very different way of thinking about and acting in organizations,” he said. “If you have don’t have the Agile mindset you are going to get it wrong.” 

Denning explained that there are three components of an Agile mindset: 

An obsession with delivering value to customers

Descaling work into small items that can be handled by self-organizing teams. Joining those teams together in a network that is interactive and can flow information horizontally as easily as up and down. Most organizations that say they are Agile usually only possess the second characteristic through Scrum, Kanban, or DevOps, but they miss the obsession with adding value and the network component. Without all three components, it is very likely that the organization will revert back to bureaucratic hierarchical top down practices. 

“You can’t scale mindsets. You either have them or you don’t, but obviously everyone in the organization has to have the same mindset. If you don’t have people in the organization with that mindset you are going to run into massive conflicts,” said Denning. 

Scaling Agile to the enterprise

Most organizations are still in the early stages of scaling Agile. “A decade ago many enterprises thought Agile was only for small teams doing small projects. Now it is being recognized that larger projects can be done using Agile and the results will be far superior to what was done in the past,” said Agile for All’s Hartman. 

Scaling Agile really means getting to a place where functions are repeatable, predictable and measurable at the team level and then bringing it in to the rest of the business. Things can start very small, but they can have fantastic success. It just takes time. It is not going to happen overnight, but it does need courage and a deep understanding of the change involved. 

“If we are trying to measure results more ruthlessly and frequently, it ends up being an organization change, culture change and how you think about business in general, even all the way to funding. It just takes time.” 

Don’t let scaled Agile mislead you

Agile is about descaling things, and finding ways to simplify things into the smallest possible component, then connecting them together in a network. Instead of thinking about scaling, organizations should think about breaking projects down into smaller teams, understanding what is truly valuable and what can wait, and limit the amount of work in progress.

Organizations need to first recognize that scaling is not a requirement for success. Second they need to recognize that however they start with scaling, it needs to be inspected and adapted as they learn. When you have projects that truly need scaling, the next step is understanding the need for small empowered teams that work together toward a common goal. Scaling agility requires agility — at all levels of the organization. It can’t be something where a bunch of teams work together and nothing else changes.

Additionally, organizations need to recognize and understand how scheduling, planning and leading all change. Trade offs need to be made and they need to be made with agility in mind. When we focus on being more Agile, we tend to get results. It feels more risky, but in the end it is actually less risky than all the assumptions we put in place that make us feel better about most projects. 

Atlassian’s Elliot predicts in five years, Agile will be the safe choice among enterprises. “It is proven to be more effective. Hanging back with the old method is actually going to be the way where you are at more risk because you look like a dinosaur and you are not getting results.” To adopt to agile, enterprises cannot just use scaling frameworks as a silver bullet, rather they will have to adapt to agile mindset of enabling and empowered team, transparency and tendency to adapt to change!

Agile has matured enough to come out of its cocoon of just a word agile! It's not combination of agility in mindset, collaboration and empowered teams leadership which are taking decisions as per market trends by not just remaining silos of hierarchy and vertical org structure.