Can we succeed with Ad-hoc Agile?

Agile has been growing in popularity with time. It is no longer being considered as a new way of working, as it has already become most popular way of working. The growth in past years have been phenomenal, to a level that it has reached even beyond 70%. When we talk about agile, Scrum comes up as the most popular model by far. And hence, most people use Agile as a term when they mean scrum and often the two are used interchangeably.

Many partitioners consider themselves agile experts once they have read through scrum concepts. Reading through Scrum concepts is easy, may be 30 mins read as included in the "The Scrum Guide". The difficult part is to understand the depth of it, which comes with more deeper study and practice. As clearly stated in the scrum guide - "Scrum is easy to understand but difficult to master"

Although Scrum has been a powerful framework, the quality of usage is still questionable. Its very difficult to find correct scrum implementation in organizations. After talking to a number of practitioners, analyzing the implementations, following is what I would like to summarize as the variations of ad-hoc agile implementations -

1. Partial Agile: Practitioners use some part of scrum and they start claiming that they are using Scrum or Agile. Most common of the usage which I have observed has been usage of daily scrum. Although doing daily scrum can still be valuable, but may not be good enough to get the entire power of scrum, as it is clearly stated in the latest Scrum Guide - "While implementing only parts of Scrum is possible, the result is not Scrum".

2. Agile with no documentation: Another point which is also very common is for practitioners to drop all documentation or structured processes in the name of agile. Its often stated that "we are agile" so we do not need any documentation or processes. It is fine to shift the focus to a different structure and towards lightweight processes, but it may not be productive to drop documentation or processes completely.

3. Agile with random experimentation: Some practitioners believe that agile means experimentation and you can experiment with anything and everything. In my view, although agile recommends experimentation, but the same should be done with caution. It has to be carried out after understanding the current frameworks/models thoroughly then trying to implement and experiment, in a structured manner. It may not be productive to experiment randomly. It is similar to a situation where you blindfold yourself and try running fast in one direction to reach your destination. You may still be lucky to reach your destination in one run, but that will not establish anything.

So, to summarize, it is a fallacy that we can succeed with ad-hoc agile. We need to understand the agile values and principles in depth, scrum concepts with deep understanding and practice, and then implement the same in entirety, in order to derive maximum value from agile.