Agile in Practice

Agile is probably one of the most relevant terms in today's Business Operations. Though Agile mostly goes hand in hand with industries and corporations, there are numerous personal use cases for Agile too. Here, I'll be mostly talking about Agility in the professional context. A couple of decades ago, something called the Agile Manifesto was published. Personally, I believe, Agile as a concept existed long before and was used by millions in their lives and their jobs. But, this manifesto was probably one of the first times a term was created and defined for this. And in no time, the Agile Manifesto became a stepping stone for some of the most revolutionary changes in the professional world.

I started to dive deep into Agile in late 2021 when I got an opportunity to work, implement and test the Agile methodology across an organisation. Although I was familiar with some processes that people use that are analogous to being Agile, this was the first time I dedicatedly started to learn about Agility. It's quite interesting to see how such a simple thing can have so much impact.

What I am planning to jot down here is nothing more than Agile in the most abstract terms: its basic 4 principles, and how I interpret these principles after spending 3000+ hours on the implementation of Agile.

Agile Manifesto

The agile manifesto is probably one of the most analogous terms to "Agility". The manifesto itself is Agile in nature: it's lean, it's minimal, it's clear. However, one important thing here is that the official website itself says "Manifesto for Agile Software Development".

This rarely means that organisations not working on software development cannot use it. Rather, all of the organisations today are trying to be Agile in one way or another. Well, coming back to the Manifesto, in most abstract terms the Manifesto says this:

On one hand, this might seem quite short, easy to understand, and easier to implement. On the other, people can probably write volumes of books on this and still be not content (I have written so much about Agile in this article alone). The way I see this is that implementing even the most basic concept becomes more difficult with the scale of implementation. In today's world, where companies have 100s of thousands of employees, even the most basic things become most complex.

So, What I am planning to do is to write articles about these four concepts from my perspective, and explain how I interpret these and how I implemented these and how they affect an organisation.

But before that, I feel it is important to give some context about Agility as a whole.

Agility

Agility is the ability to move quickly, iteratively and mindfully in a professional context. If you want to do something in an agile way, break it down, iterate on it, and keep making it better until you achieve the end goal. But it is not as simple as it sounds. Well, Agility is not something you can just follow, It's more of a concept that guides you, that directs you, but it cannot (in itself) move you. Agile is more like a way of thinking than a way of working. Agile is more of a mindset than a process.

I was lucky enough to have talked about processes and the way organisations work with many people. And what I and they realised was that Organisations try to be Agile, but in the end, no one is truly Agile. Since Agile is more of a mindset than a predefined set of processes, It makes sense that Organisations are not completely Agile. Another question might arise: Why Agile? Well, if you think it through, everyone wants to get better, to improve, and Agile concepts are currently one of the fastest ways to achieve this. This applies not only in professional spaces but also in personal spaces. Traditionally, industries relied on processes to scale, and processes take time to set up. In today's generation, being slow is a problem that can close down companies. Agility makes all the difference here; an Agile organisation can be way faster than any traditional organisation (this is a proven fact). But Agility does not go hand in hand with scale, hence bigger the organisations, the harder it is to be Agile.

It probably makes more sense to give an example to explain Agility: I am trying to follow the agile approach by writing this article. My objective is to share my thoughts on Agile in the industry. And instead of spending weeks on making this perfect, I am writing down a basic article. I'll publish this article and start working on the next article, learning from the past. I'll try to iterate and evolve each article to make it better. And this in a nutshell is being Agile. And this is the same approach which helped me get a quarter million views on Quora. (Though this is not a big number at all, for someone like me who is not a good writer, this is a personal achievement)

With that, I conclude this article, hoping that it and future articles will provide people with a better understanding and perspective on Agility.

- Anuj