Stay Agile My Friends

This title and the memes are mostly meant to give you a chuckle, but there's some validity to them as well.  It's always good to challenge the limits of what we understand agile to be, right? One thing I love about being a consultant is that I really have to have an open mind and a lot of flexibility to help deliver the right solutions for my clients. Sometimes I'll be on a project with a full PMO and robust governance structure, and other times I'll be working with an Agile team out in the wild wild west. The point being, that I've seen both ends of the spectrum. Can you be agile and waterfall at the same time?  Probably not if you look through the lenses of what we typically view as a waterfall process.  But it’s possible. Stay with me...

One thing I’ve noticed as an agile coach is that people like to gravitate towards what they know and are more comfortable with.  One way this can play out is when helping a team adopt agile, you can get a strong pull to keeping things in the box of a waterfall process. This happens both at the individual contributor level and management level. Management can sometimes want waterfall type metrics but without the changes needed to realize the true benefits of agile. It’s ok though.  Be patient, and see if you can find a way to meet somewhere in the middle. Waterfall isn't bad.  In fact it has tremendous value in the right context.  So, as an agile enthusiast make sure you aren't always negative about waterfall especially when it could be used to your advantage.  However, what you don’t want to do is fall into the trap of using the buzz words from agile/scrum but keeping things pretty much the same.

I’ve found it is helpful to ask people questions about why they want to do something a certain way. “What do you think will be the benefits of trying it this way?” “What are you hoping to accomplish by doing it this way vs. that way?” If you say things like “You are just stuck in old thinking.” or “That’s not agile.” you can build walls instead of creating bridges. If someone is pushing for trying something, and the there's a team consensus, perhaps just go with it for 1-2 sprints.  Then evaluate the impact it is having.  After all, I've always found that as an agile coach I am continually learning from the teams I work with, and surprise-surprise I DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING!