Agile Fallacy #2

Humans are pack animals. In the work context, that creates some interesting behaviour. We classify it as rational thought – “I reviewed all the options and this is what I decided to do”. It was up to me. In reality, we followed the pack. It is what pack animals do. And a lot of people are doing it with Agile. In an attempt not to get left behind, in a need to follow the pack, we are adopting Agile in droves.

But are we being blinded by another Agile fallacy – my project performance will improve if I adopt Agile.

It is easy to get drawn in to the fallacy. A review of the available literature exudes confidence in Agile as a saviour of project woes. It’s hard to find any stories of Agile having a bad impact and there are volumes written on the good news stories. Unfortunately that’s a consequence of our social-media induced haze we live in. It pays to write good news stories and tell the world that you have achieved good. It doesn’t pay to tell the world you have made a mistake – not when the person reading it might be your next potential employer. The good news stories outweigh the bad hundreds or even thousands to one. But that’s not representative of the actual results from implementing Agile. It’s just what people are writing.

Will Agile improve your project performance? It depends. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of Agile, but it doesn’t solve every woe and it is not right for every project or every organisation. What I object to is the blind belief that life will be better with Agile without any real understanding. Before following blindly, think carefully.

• Why do you have poor project performance? If your projects perform poorly because you don’t have the right resources to deliver them well, then a change to Agile may still leave you with the resource problem. You may still have poor performing projects, just being delivered differently.
• What sort of projects do you do? Agile is better where there is learning to be had along the way, where value can be delivered incrementally, where multi-functional teams can easily co-locate. If those things aren’t true, maybe Agile won’t improve your projects. If your end state is known and not going to change, if there is value in a plan, if you’re building a space rocket, it’s OK to have a waterfall project. NASA do.
• What are you trying to achieve and what does a ‘good’ project mean to you? If ‘good’ means certainty of outcome, Agile may not be right. If ‘good’ means the project follows the plan religiously, Agile may not be right. There are reasons and project types where both of those things may be inherently more valuable than the different approach you would have with an Agile delivery model.

Agile is as much about a different mindset as it is about a different toolset. You need to validate that the Agile mindset fits your culture, your vision, your company and the type of work you do. Adopting the toolset without the mindset won’t give you all the benefits. Of course, adopting the toolset is easy and therefore what a lot of people do first. But if you don’t know how to use the tool to its maximum benefit, the tool itself will not make life better.

Think carefully about adoption of Agile. It can make a huge positive change to an organisation, radically shortening time-to-value, increasing collaboration, maximising use of scarce organisational resources and improving employee engagement. It can equally slow you down, cause confusion, make projects take longer and cost more, be disruptive and deliver less.

Slow down and avoid the human urge to follow the crowd. The grass may be greener on the other side, but it still needs cutting.