A revised agile manifesto

The Coronavirus has affected everyone's life, including the agile teams around the world. Many of these have set up their organizations and way of working in accordance with the Agile Manifesto [1] and its Principles [2], and suddenly implicit commandments like "business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project" and "the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation" become more difficult to follow with the team members working from home.

Even before this worldwide crisis, I have had a problem with the normative, or authoritative, tone of the manifesto and its principles - do like "this" and the doors to heaven will open. Slightly sarcastic, why didn't the authors add "blue clothes over red ones", as we know that when a "task on hand requires people’s vigilant attention" then the color red is a good choice, but if it "calls for creativity and imagination" blue is the color to pick [3].

The point I want to make is that the manifesto and principles describe one way to achieve "agility" as it is the way to do it, hence many will follow them almost religiously without asking why they do so.

As a consequence, an obvious question in the light of the Coronavirus with people forced to work from home, or in its aftermath just want to achieve a better work-life balance, is if the heydays of “agility” are gone and the ghosts of Weber bureaucracies and Taylor’s assembly lines will emerge from the dark side?

What does it mean to be agile, and what happens if I don't follow all "commandements"?

The aim of this article is to get the ball rolling to try to dig out the essence of the Agile Manifesto and its Principles, and encourage existing agile practitioners and those considering to jump on the train to not adhere to these as the "scripture”.

Why looking for the essence of “agility” right now? By trying to identify the core principles, or beliefs, in the Agile Manifesto and Principles, we can separate them from aspects of implementation. With this as a basis, we will be able to study the existing principles and their realizations like Scrum and SAFe and try to answer the question of how to adapt these to a situation with potentially less travel and commuting and more "virtual" communications - a manifesto and principles of post-COVID Agility.

This article is the 5th in a series on different facets of organizations. It is not intended as a claim of one organizational setup or way-of-working to be better or worse than any other, as each has benefits as well as problems heavily dependent on where, when, and how they are applied. The purpose is to invite to discussions on benefits and problems, as well as myths, paradoxes, and misconceptions with past, current, and future organizational models.

Also published in this series you find reflections on the need for more bureaucracy, if scaled agile organizations are today's unicorns, the possibility of scaled agile frameworks, and the challenge of "we" in agile organizations.

What does it mean to be agile?

Let's begin with the elephant in the room - what is the definition of "agile"? To answer this, Rigby et al [4, p. 68] describe the scaled agile framework SAFe as something that "works well in companies that fear ambiguity, want to preserve a significant level of top-down control, do not believe they need many breakthrough innovations, and need to synchronize a large number of interdependencies among teams". To me, this doesn't sound like something in the spirit of the principles of agility, and I think Gren and Lenberg [5] describe SAFe very well as a framework built on four paradigms - "[a]gile principles and methods, [l]ean and systems thinking, product development flow practices and [l]ean processes". Hence, SAFe addresses both "doing the right things" (being effective through agility) and "doing things right" (being efficient through leanness), following the argument of Gren and Lenberg who conclude that:

Adopting an agile approach boils down to being more responsive to change

One way to interpret this reflection is that it actually “defines” the concept of agility, hence the manifesto and principles are just one, and definitely not the only, way to frame and realize a path to be more responsive to change.

The Coronavirus impact on agility (and leanness)

The Coronavirus is a nasty thing, but one good it brings is that agile organizations, finally, begin to ask why, for instance, physical closeness, aligned with adherence to scheduled rituals and stipulated behaviors, have been considered mandatory for agility at the same time as its principles emphasize autonomy and belief in the abilities of individuals to govern their business.

Returning to Gren’s and Lenberg’s definition of “agility”, it contains two key topics - responsiveness and change, and the concern of many agile practitioners is, most probably, that the Coronavirus will lead to an increased risk of being less responsive to change, hence doing the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong way, and with an unexpected outcome. For instance, a very unscientific poll in my LinkedIn network revealed that more than 50% felt the virus had resulted in agile challenges, at the same time as 20% felt the work had improved. In other words, post-COVID agility may not look like before the outbreak, and we need to adapt to the future as in the essence of being agile.

Moreover, if being agile is about doing the “right” thing in the setting of being (more) responsive to change, the core principles of an agile framework recognizing virtual teams, ie "geographically distributed collaborations that rely on technology to communicate and cooperate" [6], should define “right” in this setting. But, it’s important to note that these principles should focus on “what” and hand the “how” aspects to either a set of lean principles, or to be part of the implementation aspects of the revised agile principles.

Virtual-friendly agile manifesto and principles

In my attempt to get to the essentials of the Agile Manifesto [1] and Principles [2], I will partly follow the formulations used by Gren and Lenberg [5].

The manifesto

The Agile Manifesto statements can be expressed as:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working solutions over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to feedback over following plan

If I would dare to re-phrase them, I suggest the simpler statement, focusing on the “what” aspects:

Show progress by working solutions, and continuously adapt to customer needs and feedback

If we relate this statement to the original ones, I claim the first and third deal with “how” to increase the speed of development. Similarly, the reference to documentation, negotiation, and plans are ways to become faster responders to customer needs and feedback. What remains are the fundamental views that showing progress by working solutions will add a dimension of quality and understanding not covered by, for instance, mock-ups, as well as increase the ability to continuously adapt to customer needs and feedback. These two aspects reflect, in my opinion, very well the essence of agility as expressed by Gren and Lenberg.

The principles

The Agile Principles are, in my opinion, intended to put flesh on the bones in the Manifesto, but still, focusing on the “what” aspects of agility. For the sake of the discussion, let’s re-cap the essential pieces of the principles in my home-grown condensed form:

• The highest priority is to satisfy the customer by continuous delivery of valuable working solutions, including adaption to changing requirements
• Continuously attend to excellence, good design, and simplicity in the solutions
• The development will happen trough trusted, motivated, and supported cross-functional self-organizing teams with daily collaborations and face-to-face communication, including regular way-of-working improvements

The first item relates to the relation to the customer, and the outcome, and are just re-iterations of the manifesto statements. The second item is more interesting as it, in my opinion, doesn’t add any value. That is, is there any non-agile framework that honors below-par efforts, poor design, and more complex solutions than needed? Finally, the last item addresses the “how” part, including detailed prescriptions on way-of-working contradicting the statement to trust people to get the work done.

To conclude, the Agile Principles are according to me either already covered by the manifesto, stating the obvious, or prescribing detailed practical behaviors contradicting the essence of being trusted to organize the work as best suiting the situation. Hence, in a post-COVID agile future, we only need the guiding star to always show progress by working solutions, and to continuously adapt to customer needs and feedback.

Reflections

Most probably this article has upset proponents of agility, by dry boiling the Agile Manifesto and Principles to a vision to carry out developments which “show progress by working solutions, and continuously adapt to customer needs and feedback” and considering aspects related to the way of working within teams and towards customers to be part of implementations like Scrum or SAFe and not a manifesto or set of principles.

To adapt a line of thinking like the Agile Manifesto and Principles to changed circumstances like the Coronavirus one has to, as Gren and Lenberg, extract the essence, or core, to establish a frame, or foundation, for a revised perspective. In this case, it shows that there are no contradictions between the essence of being agile and virtual teams.

This article lays the foundation for forthcoming ones on how one can both align with the vision of agility and adapt to a post-COVID world.

Do you agree that to “show progress by working solutions, and continuously adapt to customer needs and feedback” is a good-enough "manifesto" for being agile? Please, share your opinions, as it's only through an open-minded discussion development takes place.

Stay safe and be part of the solution,

Magnus

All views expressed in this article are my own and do not represent the opinions of any entity whatsoever with which I have been, am now, or will be affiliated with.

The author has more than 20 years of international experience in supporting organizations to utilize Information Technology to achieve business excellence. His assignments span AI and data analytics in pharmaceutical research to e-commerce and supply chain management in the fashion industry. Often with a focus on digital transformation combining traditional management with approaches like Lean, Six Sigma, Kanban, and Agile to reach new frontiers for development.

References

[1] Agile Manifesto Organization. Manifesto for agile software development, 2020

[2] Agile Manifesto Organization, Principles behind the Agile Manifesto, 2020

[3] R Mehta and R Zhu, Blue or Red? Exploring the Effect of Color on Cognitive Task Performances, Science, 2009

[4] D Rigby et al, Doing agile right - transformation without chaos, 2020, HBR Press

[5] L Gren and P Lenberg, Agility is responsiveness to change: an essential definition, EASE '20: Proceedings of the Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, 2020

[6] S Morrison-Smith and J Ruiz, Challenges and barriers in virtual teams: a literature review, Springer Nature Applied Sciences, 2020