Don’t do Agile, be agile

Recently Agile Coach, Marc Luijting spoke to our colleagues about being agile. Read all about Marc’s journey into becoming an Agile Coach, a small history on agile, different agile frameworks, and ultimately, what it really means to be agile here;

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Don’t do Agile, be agile

If you search in Google for “agile misunderstandings”, you’ll get over three million hits. So with that in mind - I won’t be giving the definitive answer on what agile is and what isn’t. But I can provide some background and share some thoughts on the difference between doing agile and being agile.

Back in the 90’s, I started my first ‘real’ job in a state-owned?organisation?in the Netherlands. It was big and bureaucratic. It was under pressure to change. The?organisation?would be?privatised?and had to be made ready to face?the?competition. I was part of the 800 people-strong task force that prepared for this transition. After the elections the new government decided our business was too important to leave to the market and the?organisation?would remain state-owned. After a year of planning, all we had were reports and slide decks that were no longer relevant. I knew something was wrong… but this was my first job, and I couldn’t lay my finger on what that was.

Then I got a job in the IT department in an option trading company. The contrast couldn’t have been bigger. Market forces were relentless,?the?competition was merciless, and change was the only constant. The economic circumstances changed, stock markets changed their rules, and new technologies needed to be adopted as soon as they became available to stay competitive. Here I got to know Scrum. My team elected me to go to the Scrum Master training. I entered the Agile world, and I could place my past experience in perspective. What we were doing here in this trading company - delivering real value fast and in small chunks, talking almost daily with the traders, taking change as opportunities to outdo the competition - stood in stark contrast with my previous experience where we spent a year on planning without delivering anything meaningful in the end. I knew I had found my calling.

Although there were earlier developments, Agile really started with the ‘Agile Manifesto’ from 2001. This was meant to remedy the ills of traditional software development projects that were overly regulated, over-planned, and micromanaged.

The Agile Manifesto contains four value statements and twelve principles. It can roughly be boiled down to something like: people from different disciplines should collaborate closely together to produce something valuable, learn as they go, and accept that they can’t know everything upfront. And that’s more or less it. There’s nothing in there about Scrum, story-points, Kanban boards, flow metrics, backlogs, or?OKR’s.

Of course, a small manifesto with four values and a dozen principles is open to interpretation and debate. That’s all good and well. Having a conversation about how these ideas are relevant in your situation and how to apply them in your daily work, is a fundamental first step to becoming agile.

The real confusion began when money started playing a part. Agile became the next ‘big thing’. New methods and frameworks were created to help you become Agile. All came with their own training programs and certification schemes. Also, a plethora of Agile tools came into being, with their ‘standard’, ‘premium’ and ‘enterprise’ payment plans. Many of these methods, frameworks, tools and courses are helpful indeed. And the people behind them need to make a living, too. But quite a number of these things were marketed as ‘the only true way to the light’. The marketing effort to sell methodologies and tools introduced a lot of confusion in the conversation because if you weren’t doing this or using that, you were not doing the right kind of Agile. As a 2019 Forbes article stated: “the term Agile has been diluted almost to meaninglessness because of unrestrained marketing.”

This emphasis on methodologies and tools led many people to believe that if you were using certain tools or doing certain things, you were agile.?Especially?Scrum was - and is - often seen as synonymous with Agile. As a result, quite some companies made teams do Scrum, thinking they would become agile that way. And sometimes that worked. Scrum was my first introduction to Agile as well.

However, doing Scrum did not always have the desired effect. Some companies gave project managers the title of Scrum Master and chopped their long term projects into two week sprints. Now they were agile - but they didn’t see much change. In some cases things got even worse. These companies still stuck to the same way of planning the scope and timelines for their projects, and Scrum just added more meetings to the mix. The conclusion was that Scrum failed and Agile didn’t work.

Of course there is value using a good framework and working with the right tools. These things can give structure to your work, help you have the right conversations, and give you more insights into your progress and your performance. But these things are there to help you; they are not goals in themselves. In the end, Agile isn’t about job titles, applying a framework, following a methodology, or using the right tools. It’s about having the mindset to embrace change, to work together, to deliver early value, to reduce waste, and to continuously reflect and adjust your way of working to become more effective. Don't just do Agile, be agile!