Agile - what has changed?
Araceli Higueras
Author | Product Owner | <How to be the CEO of your Career> Coach | UX Designer | Copywriter | Business Analyst
Yesterday Neil Walker took us through a time journey at the Meetup for the Agile Xpertise group. He has been working in this field for over 30 years in a plethora of roles and organisations. Neil also shared his professional development.
The session was as interactive as possible, with him ascertaining from the audience (and trying to adapt to the answers to):
- When did we start out agile journey?
- What's the biggest change we've seen since starting our agile journey?
- Do agile frameworks, methodologies and processes make one agile?
- What are the benefits of agile today?
The answers, aggregated and displayed, sparked a conversation and gave an entry point into the points that Neil wanted to make.
In a nutshell, what this group is about is cultivating an agile mindset, so that skill sets, tool sets, processes and methodologies are meaningful and consistent with "being" agile, not a blindly applied process/methodology/technique in isolation.
My main takeways from this session were:
- The importance of simplicity (principle #10: “Simplicity — the art of maximising the amount of work not done — is essential”). "There is nothing so wasteful as doing with great efficiency, that which should not be done at all."
- The act of collaboration- being generous with feedback, in speaking up, supporting each other, not focusing on how we are going to be judged makes a difference.
- The mindset is everything- not just in scrum teams (development squads), the whole organisation should experiment, fail, learn, embrace new experiences. Let's bring ourselves and engage with what we do, rather than just continue doing the same in our hamster wheel.
- Embrace uncertainty. It's a fact, we can expect change, so let's not focus on predictions and let's focus on experimentation and learning, removing obstacles from others, leading by example.
Finger pointing to leaders and their role in this, they have to step up.
Technical Business Analyst at Global Relay
4 年Hi Ara, Great piece, the first project I worked on that adopted the Agile principles was back in 2007, it took me a while to get my head around the 'Agile mindset' and how Scrums were used to get the team to embrace that mindset. In answer to your question, I certainly think Agile has a future and will be used more commonly by organisation, it offers the customer the ability to see small fully functional features in iterations vs the waterfall approach that follows a strict process. The customer doesn't gain access to the product until UAT, requirements that were captured at the Analyze/Design phase may have changed.