Being Agile or Doing Agile?
R Ravi Shankar
Director Data Science @ Honeywell | M Tech (Data Science), MBA, PMP, Six Sigma Green Belt
During agile implementation in various teams, one is often asked a whole bunch of questions on agile processes. While I emphasize on the Agile values and principles and say it is more important to "Be agile" than "Do agile", people find it harder to properly imbibe the values and principles and find it easier to understand practices and processes. It is not often that you would find anyone who will say upfront that they don't agree with the Agile values and principles or that they haven't imbibed them. Yet when it comes to practice, they would do exactly the opposite of what the values and principles uphold. Such discrepancies when found at a team level can often be resolved, but they are harder to change when it comes to organizational processes. Examples include not giving time for innovation, centralized decision making, driving ever increasing utilization of human resources, penalties for failure resulting in risk aversion, short term thinking with focus on a business case for a project and not taking into account long term debilitating effects on the product, viewing agile transformation merely as an opportunity to improve one's own performance rating etc. To truly transform into an agile organization, all the people need to imbibe the Agile values and principles. Yet, how does one reinforce the values and principles and not let circumstances, experience and time dictate their absorption? One way is to not quickly answer any question on an agile practice or process, rather let the questioner go back to the Agile values and principles and find her answer, with the coach acting as a facilitator. It might seem like an overdo at first, but this would help the teams come up with the answers to their questions themselves and "Be agile" faster. Same with organizational processes that hinder agile absorption; leaders need to understand how these conflict with the Agile values and principles and so need to change.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime!