My agile journey, with people

A lot can be learnt about an individual based on their experience, things they read and people they interacted with. Today I would like to share how my thoughts on Agile were shaped and pay homage to great thinkers who influenced me. This is far from a conclusive list, only the major breakthroughs in my understanding of Agile and people associated with them. I hope directing to those experienced industry people will help you in your own agile journey.

The Understanding - ángel Medinilla

@angel_m

I already had around 2 years of agile development experience at the time I've met ángel at my PSM training, most of it as a Scrum Master. I think I always had a strong understanding of how to make development teams work an how to contribute, in a pragmatic sense. That being said most of the things I did was simply replicating good practices I saw and applying common sense. It was enough to work, but without a broader context evolving the way I worked was a painful process. ángel was the first person to make me fully understand and embrace agile values and principles. His work took me all the way through working in an agile team into Product Ownership. There is something about his sketches and his comedy routine that makes it so approachable, yet not oversimplified. His "Scrum Dude => Scrum Mum => True Scrum Master" model, the "Core of Agile", his stand-up comedy about warehouse software and users without hands, the way he explains roles and practices, agile project and product management principles, the list goes on and on. I've also benefited greatly from a series of ~5 minute YouTube videos on agile product management (in Spanish), which unfortunately never took off. For non-Spanish speakers there are many other valuable videos on Angel's channel, as his stand-up-comedy-like style translates very well to a video format.

The Structuring - Scott Ambler

@scottwambler

Scott is the only one on this list whom I've never met in person. I think his work proceeding him is a testament to how strong it is. I've started by using agilemodeling.com and disciplinedagiledelivery.com websites in my work, then read both Disciplined Agile Delivery (now replaced by Choose your WoW!) and Agile Modelling over few weeks. I've mentioned most of the reasons behind their usefulness in my article "Every Agilist needs to know DA". It is invaluable when you know how to be agile, but you are lacking techniques on how to do agile - effective ways to model in an agile environment, just-barely-good-enough documentation and a plethora of alternative practices to the standard ones you've seen or heard about. Being too focused on specific practices and artefacts is a problem I see in the industry, and Scott's work is the remedy. For me it created the structure I needed to comfortably start experimenting and tailoring the way I, and the teams I consulted, work. It answered the questions, which most other coaches deflected with the "you will figure it out for yourself" trump card, yet in a way that didn't close my horizon - it expanded it further.

The Dreaming - Jürgen de Smet

@JurgenLACoach

I will be honest with you, after learning Disciplined Agile I was sure I found my framework of choice. It is so comprehensive I was sure to construct optimal solution for any scenario. I did however underestimate the power of dreams.

LeSS as described by Jürgen has this wonderful quality of being completely unrealistic as a whole, yet making sense every step of the way. It is the "ideal world scenario" I would have never thought of with a sane mind, yet I feel compelled to aspire to it and it feels more realistic every day. Starting from the principles, not accepting the status quo and forcing the enterprise to bend to what you know is right, to how you know things should work - it is an exciting and intoxicating process. Before that I was prepared to face any reality, no matter how complex, but after learning from Jürgen the complex realities became simple again. He reminded me of the principles I've long buried below the pile of experience and know-how. Don't get me wrong, Jürgen's method is guided by complete rationality and empiricism, as well as all the practices and tools I learnt before are still playing nicely with the new world view. It's just that now I dare to dream more, I embrace the power of simplicity and I remember his lesson that allowing the prevalence of bad agile practices will ultimately be the death of our industry.

I hope you enjoyed your time reading and also that in some way, directly or indirectly, it will impact your agile journey. I am thankful to the three aforementioned gentlemen for how they impacted mine and made core of agile journey about improvement and uncovering better ways of working.