The "Agile" Game

Let's play an "Agile" survey game. Where is the value (by %) to the business, organization and teams derived from in "Agile" value systems, practices, frameworks, methods, competencies, patterns and processes?

This article will undoubtedly spark heated debates. Let's learn from it. Every business is in the software business now so this will have an obvious technical bent.

1. Lean and Systems Thinking

2. The Agile Manifesto for Software Development

3. Team and Technical Agility - XP

4. Team and Technical Agility - DevOps

5. Scrum

6. Kanban Systems (perhaps part of #1)

7. TBM

8. ITIL

9. Project Management (Prince/PMBoK)*

10. Lean Startup

11. Lean UX

12. Other that you choose

I'd say roughly 50% comes from Lean and Systems Thinking. Both of which predate the Agile revolution - by decades and centuries. Another 20% from Team and Technical Agility - XP in particular and building a real continuous delivery pipeline. Next I have to give credence to Reinertsen's brilliance -- real economic and Lean based Product Management for another 20%. In pragmatic terms, this is it folks.

The remaining 10% of the value comes from everything else.

YET, so much weight is often put on that 10%. We often overload the term Agile so much that it has little meaning anymore to those in the know, and even less to those outside the agile-sphere.

Agile is dead! Long live Agile! @%Q#%$! Or perhaps, more appropriately... Let Agile Live!

Notice when I mentioned the CDP I didn't mention DevOps. DevOps is dead!! The marketers have already started to ruin that one. What are the Three Ways anyway?

Teams could easily use XP without ever reading or discussing or practicing "Agile." Same goes for building a CDP. We would not have to teach or discuss DevOps. We'd just think Lean and Systems Theory.

I'm not anti-Agile or anti-DevOps. I just see that much of what is there simply re-packaged or attempted to re-invent concepts that already existed. This does not make the concepts ground breaking. Perhaps more consumable? That last 10% is important. Who wouldn't want ten percent more?

DO NOT START WITH AGILE!

However, we should put 100% of our efforts into obtaining the first 90%, first.

*We have observed that organizations get a negative impact (-%) from using "project and assumption based thinking" in flow and product based ways of working/thinking/feeling