Agile vs agility?... I'm rooting for agility

Many of us use the term "agile" in a soft-tech business context. Please comment below on what your interpretation is, in your experience. What does that mean to you?

I have come to believe that the term "agile teams" refers to a set of principles that a team adopts as if it were a code of conduct, that helps them deliver the most value to the customer as quickly as possible. That's it.

So agile is not dogmatic - it allows for movement, it allows for change. The team is free to choose the tools, the ceremonies and the frequency of how they operate based on what works for their team.

The idea was to have teams think about value to the end-user, every step of the way and increase communication so we can help each other get past any obstacles. It was meant to increase flexibility to accept ideas and question the norm. To bring authenticity to the process by creating a space where team members can be curious, can question, can share and push-back on ideas in a judgement free zone.

Agility is driven by how creative a team can be in how they operate. That requires some amount of autonomy and trust from the leadership. I say this because agility does not scale across teams when process and tools are mandated. When employees have to worry about what they say during a standup...

I haven't worked in a Google, Amazon or Facebook to know everything there is to know about scaling agile teams, but what I do know is that we cannot describe how agile we are by talking about the tools we use. It's more about how often we release production ready code and how much we trust our team to make changes.

[drop the mic]

Photo Credit : superawesome.com

Special thanks to those who've had long drawn out conversations with me on this topic. There are too many to list!