How Agile is Too Agile?
Gordon Tredgold Globally Ranked Leadership Expert
Global Gurus Top Leadership Expert, Coach and Speaker - "RESULTS BASED LEADERSHIP"
Let me start by saying that I am a huge fan of Agile. Throughout my career I have been an advocate for leaner processes, less unnecessary bureaucracy, and more delegated decision making.
And I love how Agile challenges these things and proposes much leaner and better, in my opinion, alternatives.
However, there is such a thing as too lean. There are some things that are needed for some control, and steering of projects and we need to make sure that we do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Recently I have worked on a couple of projects where the level of planning was excruciating, almost to the point where the plans added no value. They were just a process for process sake and did little to control the project. In fact, they often deflected people away from delivering the project.
But I have also seen the other end of the scale where plans and planning has stopped altogether other than at the highest of levels. The argument being the timescales are too tight and we just need to start delivering.
I often think that Projects and Music have a lot in common with the plans being the sheet music the orchestra can follow.
If you want to throw away the sheet music then you need to have a highly skilled group who all know the piece by heart and their role within it.
Even then it is still open to mistakes and the risks of failure.
But if you are playing a new piece of music, with less inexperienced people you would never think of throwing the music away.
The same is true with projects, we have to get the balance right between the scale and complexity of the work, and the level of experience of the people who have to deliver it.
Get that right and you can be successful.
Get it wrong and it will end in tears!
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6 年Agreed! I like the analogy to playing music: for people who love classical music played from sheets, listening to a free jazz orchestra could be a painful experience ;-)
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6 年Very insightful article. Thank you! Your points of view mirror what I wrote in my article “When Agile is Bad for Business.” https://next-curve.com/2017/10/17/when-agile-is-bad-for-business/. There is a difference between execution (the orchestra) and innovation (the jazz fusion band that is improvising). You definitely prepare differently and have to think differently. But even jazz groups need some structure -Real Book or Fake Book. If you are a musician, you know what I mean. We are finding that more and more organizations are settling with some hybrid form of Agile that blends traditional project planning and management practices with Agile principles. In fact, we were doing this way back during the heyday of ERP when SMBs started to implement ERPs and consultancies had to figure out how to quickly and cost-effectively deploy entire suites of ERPs to “successfully” fit a business. We used Agile methods to de-risk the configuration work and any custom app development through sprints of design-build-test. Methodologies are just tools. You use them in a fit for purpose way and adapt them for the situation you are dealing with. Getting religious about Agile is counterproductive and won’t garner success in my experience.
Program Director - Tech, Transformation, Integration | Agile / SAFe | PMP | CSM | AI PM | CSPO
6 年Agile is really a business mind-set, how to deliver the most market value the quickest, requiring the right balance of prioritization, speed, agility and process - but never process for process-sake. It is founded on and driven by that mindset. Teams that don't understand and align on this from the start, will have difficulty achieving the inherent value and results regardless.
Finance Director
6 年It is all about adjusting your individual Skills towards your people. Agile competence is required to achieve great results in a harmonic way.
Senior Systems Engineer
6 年I want to echo Mr. Singh's comment.? Far too often we let inexperienced development teams claim adherence to an agile process as an excuse for doing little or no planning.? I had a manager who once told me "You have to know the rules to break the rules," meaning that only one who understood the reason behind rules and processes was in a position to intelligently disregard those that were counterproductive in a given situation.? Likewise, development teams should first learn and become proficient in more robust planning processes and then be rewarded with the freedom to apply agile processes to appropriate projects for which they have been selected.? ?