In business we often move from one business critical project to the next, without a moment to think of the bigger picture. The result is that this often creates an illusion of organisational effectiveness and efficiency. Digging deeper, there are often many areas ripe for improvement. Agile is a business strategy that can produce results - if Senior Managers are willing to commit to making changes.
"Much is made of Agile practices, but in order to really revolutionise your business, you need to start thinking in an Agile way in order to behave in an Agile way", says Sean Hanly, MD of Exoftware.
Discussions on Agile software methods usually focus on Agile practices and their benefits and challenges for teams. The actual values and principles of Agile take a back seat. Even during Agile transformations, companies often relegate Agile values and principles to inspirational talks.
This makes sense in one way. Agile practices are concrete and very specific. They seem like a logical starting point for companies eager for change.
However, if we slavishly implement Agile practices without really understanding the values and principles of Agile, we are missing the mark. By blindly following the practices without thought to the particular situation, we are more likely to fail - maybe we won't fail as badly as we would without Agile - but it will fail us in the long run.
By embedding Agile principles - not just practices - into an organisation, companies can begin to apply Agile thinking rather then just practices to a given situation. A deep understanding of Agile thinking allows companies to find the right Agile practice - and adapt it - for their given context. If companies begin to think in Agile manner and they can begin to act in Agile way - regardless of what practices they are using. Companies that make this leap can deal with almost any business situation.
Take for example the practice of daily stand ups. How do we deal with this as a large, distributed team? How do we deal with partners and clients that are offsite? What are daily stand ups really forcing us to think about?
Daily stand ups are really about getting us to have as much face-to-face communication everyday. Interacting with our team as much as possible. We need to do this so that our project is delivering exactly what the customer wants and that any issues or questions are resolved quickly. As we begin to really dig deeper into the values and principles of Agile we can make intelligent decisions on how to adapt and apply practices to specific situations. For our large, distributed team, this may mean doing things like team stand ups that report into project wide stand-ups. It may mean making use of video conferencing or sending team ambassadors.
So while on the surface daily stand-ups make seem unthinkable in a large distributed team, delving deeper into the values means we can start to see how Agile ideas can be applied in new ways.
Another example is the concept of minimum market feature set which comes from "Software by Numbers: Low Risk, High Return Development." (Denne, Mark; Cleland-Huang Jane; 2003). The concept basically states, that projects should deliver the minimum set of features that would allow us to go to market e.g., start selling - first. This concept is not bound to Agile necessarily, but follows the principles of Agile of delivering working software, early and often. MMFS goes one step further to help us define what set of features should be first in order to: go to market, get feedback and importantly get to profit - faster.
As we have said, Agile is much more then a set of practices, it is a way of thinking and operating as a business. This idea of understanding the core Agile values and principles is especially important for larger organisations interested in Agile. In larger organisations, projects issues can be more complex, often because of the sheer numbers of people involved, scale of projects and corporate structures. This is where a deeper understanding of the Agile values and principles would allow us to creatively address organisational issues.
Box out "We are now really thinking about how to apply Agile to our projects, rather then thinking only about the practices. This has meant that we have changed some practices to suit us - but it works, we are more about LogicaCMG Agile - then a specific methodology like SCRUM or XP."
The end goal is not just that teams practice Agile, but that they understand it and can apply it to new situtations that arise. This adaptabilty is a trademark of Agile and ensure that companies get a customised Agile approach that fits their specific business strategy and competitive environment.
If anything Agile has taught us to throw away convention and think more about the goal of any project: delivering real business value to customers.
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