“Born Again” Agile
I have been managing and mentoring Agile software development projects for close to six years. I became sick and tired of “Agile” about a year ago. Then I became a “born-again” Agilist last month. Read on to learn about my Agile rebirth and journey from Agile’s biggest fan to a non-believer and back.
Where It All Began
When I graduated college, I started on a project at a federal client site where the Project Manager wanted to “go Agile.” I legitimately thought for six months that he just meant we wanted to run the project swiftly. After a few months, I ended up managing the project and people kept commenting on how “Agile” I was. I accepted the praise but kept wondering what they meant because to me I was just doing things that made sense. I decided to finally research Agile, read the Manifesto, shrugged my shoulders, decided “sure, fine that makes sense” and moved on. Within the next year, I became the Agile Delivery Subject Matter Expert (SME) on the program.
Later that same year I switched over to STSI and became an Agile Mentor and Scrum of Scrums Master for a DevOps team. I then began the task of “evangelizing” my Agile wisdom upon the client and have spent the last three years trying to bring a large-scale Agile adoption to a predominantly waterfall government IT shop.
Losing Faith
However, somewhere along these six years, I lost my enthusiasm for Agile and developed a stale approach to teaching it. I went from passionately facilitating workshops and continuously prototyping new techniques and approaches to just mechanically assessing teams backlogs and ceremonies against an arbitrary “rule set” of how I thought we should measure Agile adoption “success.”
It took a new client coming in who was virtually allergic to any sort of Agile jargon or ceremonies for me to realize that the “Agile” I was promoting was not really Agile but just a series of norms that worked for my team. We were trying to impose our belief system across the entire organization. The Agile we were promoting violated the basic tenant of a self-organizing team.
In order to dig myself out of my own Agile pit, I wanted to get back to the basics. To the Agile that made me excited to teach others to continuously improve and explore. The Agile that six years ago, I didn’t even know I was doing. The Agile that was just “doing what makes sense.”
Refocusing
As I started digging around, I realized I wasn’t the only one going through an Agile “rebirth”. In fact, some of the original Manifesto co-authors went through the same “crisis” and were also clawing their way back to the basics of Agile.
In 2014, Alistair Cockburn, an Agile Manifesto co-author, found himself saying: “Agile has become overly decorated. Let’s scrape away those decorations for a minute, and get back to the center of agile.” Alistair then came up with the concept of the “Heart of Agile” which serves as a reminder to get back to the original spirit of Agile:
It is not about ceremonies and debates on two week versus four week sprints. It is about collaboration across the team to deliver something of value, then improving via reflecting upon where you are and where you esteem to be.
This led to me to reflect on my own team’s processes and start asking if what we were doing was helping us collaborate more effectively, deliver more frequently, reflect honestly, and improve continuously? If the answer was “no” to any of those questions, that process was cut. We started to focus more on “being” Agile instead of “doing” Agile.
For so long I was focused on teaching the “right thing” to do for teams, but what I was forgetting was that the concept of “right” is and should be subjective to each team. Teams need to tailor their processes to fit their needs. By trying to standardize my mentoring into set rules, I was doing a disservice to the teams. They didn’t feel the passion for Agile because I was removing their ability to be a self-organizing team.
As I came to these realizations, I thought more on how to adjust my Agile coaching approach. How could I easily teach people the “Heart of Agile” without set rules and standards to follow? This landed me on a post by Dave Thomas, another Agile Manifesto co-author. Dave hasn’t participated in Agile events, isn’t affiliated with the Agile Alliance and does not do any Agile consultancy because he doesn’t think those activities are in alignment with the spirit in which the Manifesto was written. He feels that the word “Agile” has effectively become meaningless as consultants and Agilists have built around it mounds of processes and documents. Instead he urges us all to get back to the basics of Agile which he defines as:
What to do:
* Find out where you are
* Take a small step towards your goal
* Adjust your understanding based on what you learned
* Repeat
How to do it: When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier.
Born Again
Agile isn’t about strict adherence to the 12 principles and 4 values. Agile is about achieving incremental improvements towards your goal, being on the same page of where you are, reflecting on your process and repeating as you go. That in essence is all it really takes to implement Agile and this is exactly what I have started teaching and practicing (again) as I continue to embark on my “Agile Rebirth.”
