Agile is Doing Just Fine, Thanks

Everybody and their dog, or cat if you're a cat person, is piling on agile, or Agile, these days. Agile coaches are getting turfed left-right-and-centre, and pundits are maligning that agile is dead, or that you should stop using the word agile - and then five seconds later they post a link to their Certified Agile Whatever course.

At one point or another we've all been guilty of this, and I've been sucked into many of these change management is dead, or agile is dead conversations that don't solve anything and serve no purpose outside of chest-puffing.

If I had to pick a side, I'd say agile, and Agile are just fine, and I could care less about what some state-of-whatever says. I say that because I don't work for the companies that say agile isn't working.

There's a few reasons why agile, or Agile, is just fine:

• The manifesto is timeless. Everyone interprets it in their own way, some miss out on the intent, and others don't. At the startup I work for , our roadmap is 100% driven by customer demand, but we have a list of stuff we think is a good idea. It's always changing, or sometimes wrong and outdated, but nobody cares about what we might do a year from now. Well, no one except for potential funders, they want to know where their money is going and that's reasonable. So we plan as much as we need to, but we always plan to re-plan.
• Agility is contextual. At Lean Change and at the startup, we can release software updates a million times a day if we want. That's fine when a handful of people are using the software, it's less ok when there are thousands of people using it. Especially non-technical users that get upset when things change too fast. We can fix stuff, or make improvements crazy-fast but we wouldn't just keep changing stuff for the sake of changing stuff. So we're as agile as we need to be. Our context dictates how agile, or Agile, we are at any given moment.
• The Agile Principles are solid. I've always hypothesized that most people gloss over the principles. They're a gold mine and great as conversation starters. I've heard clients say "well, we can't do that here because..." when they read one of the principles, and I always respond with: "well, would it be better if you could do that here?" If yes, we explore, if no, it's probably not worth it. Sometimes system barriers are beyond our control, or we don't understand the problem we think Agile will help us solve.
• A Thing is just a Thing. Agile is an idea. Martin Fowler said it best when he described the reason they called it a manifesto is because it was a statement about their beliefs. Your beliefs, or the beliefs of the people in your organization will probably differ from the beliefs of the manifesto authors. Folks pining about agile being dead have an agenda, everyone does. So why do you care if someone says it's dead? What are you trying to prove, and who are you trying to prove it to?

All ideas and things go through cycles. Remember when Intrapreneurship was a big thing? I can't remember the last time I saw anyone post about that. Probably because it's hard to spell.

That said, I hosted an intrapreneur conference a decade ago and the keynote speaker said, "50 years from now, I'll be dead and you all will still be talking about this, but you'll just call it something different because two things never change: Competition and innovation. The more we compete, the more we create the need for innovation. The more we innovate, the more competition we create."

And so it'll go with agile, or Agile. It'll get kicked around for another couple years and the only people we won't hear talking about whether or not its dead are those working in companies that get it.

The rest is just noise.