Why I'm sick of hearing about Agile organisations
It's common to hear people talking about an organisation being Agile. Often it's not clear what people mean when they say this, but in my experience it usually means that the organisation has adopted a bunch of practices that are commonly associated with Agile such as: visualising work; creating flow by limiting work in progress; time boxing things; and the like.
But adopting these practices is not being Agile in the sense of the Agile manifesto. The Agile Manifesto is a set of values and principles about how to develop and deliver software. So when I ask people who talk about a business being Agile about how does that business deliver working software regularly they often look at me confused. I've hear things like "we develop policy not software".
When I ask what they do they say the do things like iteratively develop their outcomes in regular consultation with key stakeholders. I've seen policy teams develop government policy in rapid, regular iterations involving review and feedback from key stakeholders and interested members of the public. At no point are they letting the architecture evolve (one of the 12 principles underlying the Agile values).
What these teams are doing is being Lean. Agile is a way of being Lean when developing software. Agile values are:
As you can see these values are based on developing software. It makes little sense to talk of a policy team valuing working software over comprehensive documentation. After all, policy is comprehensive documentation.
Lean values are:
As you can see, these values can apply to anything that a team or organisation is doing. When you are doing software development Agile is a way of being Lean. it's not the only way of being Lean; for example Continuous Delivery and DevOps are other ways of being Lean. They can work with Agile, they can also be ways of being Lean in non Agile contexts.
So how about we stop talking about Agile organisations? And maybe we should stop building heavy handed (un Agile) processes for scaling Agile. What we want is our software delivery teams to be Agile as that is an excellent way of implementing Lean in software delivery. But for the rest of the organisation we can better support Agile software delivery by implementing Lean values in our leadership, decision making, governance, procurement etc.