Long live the Manifesto

I have been wallowing in the Agile world for over 20 years and I have realized for some time now that I have almost become allergic to the word "agile": not to those 4 sentences that I would have tattooed on my chest, but to how we have turned them upside down by stopping to ask ourselves why those sentences were born.

Those 4 sentences were not written by famous economists, or by great philosophers: they were written by computer scientists, technicians who for too long had worked in a way that didn't work in the software world (and still doesn't work) and who had developed alternative and more effective models, many of which have now been forgotten or relegated to marginal roles. The first driving force, I am convinced, was finding a better way of working, which didn't make hundreds of people spit blood for a nightly release that was the result of months of work in which the word quality was a scarecrow to wave at the end of the work, when everyone knew that in the end someone else would be holding the baby.

The gap between the original intention behind agile and the way it's often implemented today is stark, especially in long-established companies with deeply entrenched, centralized decision-making processes. What was meant to be a way for developers to break free from inefficient practices has, in many cases, been reduced to a set of rituals that don't challenge the status quo. As a result, in these organizations, adopting agile methodologies often faces significant hurdles, where the intended benefits of flexibility and empowerment are lost amidst bureaucratic resistance and rising costs.

In companies with a long history and a highly centralized decision-making structure, the adoption of agile methodologies and the promotion of decentralized decision-making can encounter significant challenges. The cost of these challenges, in terms of resources and time, increases exponentially as processes remain rooted in centralization. Several factors contribute to this rise in costs:

1. Number of Meetings Required to Make a Decision: In centralized processes, even minor decisions require approval from higher management levels. This slows down decision-making and requires an increasing number of meetings to gain consensus. The number of meetings grows due to the need to involve different management layers, along with their respective approval timelines.

2. Number of People Involved and Their Level: In a centralized environment, many high-level individuals must be involved in making strategic decisions, which increases the complexity and cost of the decision-making process. The more people involved, the greater the resource consumption, as these individuals often have busy schedules and less time for operational meetings.

3. Increase in the "Cost of Delay": The slowness of decision-making leads to delays in adopting agile practices and in implementing changes more generally. This delay can be measured as a "cost of delay," which refers to the cost associated with each day of delay in making critical business decisions, especially regarding time to market and the value perceived by customers.

4. Cultural Change Challenges: Decentralizing decision-making often implies a significant cultural shift, which can face internal resistance. Companies with established processes are often reluctant to change the way they make decisions, particularly if the change undermines centralized authority and control.

A potential strategy to address this issue is to adopt a gradual approach to decentralization, creating pilot areas where teams are empowered to make autonomous decisions for specific projects. The success of these initiatives can serve as an example to promote broader change. Simultaneously, tracking the number of meetings, people involved, and the difficulty level in making decisions can serve as key metrics to measure progress toward genuine adoption of agile practices.

There is indeed a common tendency to reach a new status quo after significant effort, where teams may have been established and are typically adopting Scrum, but they remain far from autonomous. The decision-making process often stays the same, retaining its high costs and slow pace. As a result, the evolution of these teams is minimal—they might only achieve some localized optimizations.?

While teams might conduct regular retrospectives and address some internal issues, we do not see substantial systemic improvements. This new status quo can be more resistant than the previous one because it creates the illusion of progress (i.e., teams "doing agile" by following Scrum) without truly decentralizing decision-making or empowering teams to make impactful changes. The organization might then feel a sense of accomplishment, making it harder to push for further, deeper transformation. This state, where superficial changes are made without addressing the underlying structural issues, can be even more difficult to shift than the original centralized setup because the organization might believe that it's already agile, even though the decision-making inertia remains.