Being Agile vs. Doing Agile

Overheard at an interview.

The interviewer asked, “Do you have any questions for us?”, the interviewee, who was a senior software developer, answered “Yes, does this squad follow Scrum or Kanban or Agile?”

The interviewer replied “Good question, yes, we are Agile, as we have all the Agile ceremonies like daily standup, sprint review, retrospective and sprint planning”

The interviewee “Aaah, that’s great. My previous organization was also Agile. I was assigned the additional role of a Scrum Master. We followed Kanban with 2-week sprints and I used to facilitate the scrum ceremonies when I had some time to spare”

Do you see any anomalies in the conversation above? An Agilist’s ears would swell if not burn listening to it!

The concept of “Agility” in the software industry, in general, has been misunderstood and trivialized, condensing its essence to “conducting Agile or rather Scrum Ceremonies”. As many of you know and have experienced, there is much more to Being Agile than just Doing Agile.

If one had to condense the essence of being Agile into a single statement, it would probably read
“Being Agile means being ready to accept change at any point”

What this means is that individuals, squads and organizations need to be prepared mentally, emotionally & technologically to accept CHANGE even if it comes late into the product development.

Not only is this the essence of being Agile but also the most challenging part of it.

The ceremonies are definitely designed to achieve this by creating a regular cadence of “inspect and adapt” cycles, but what they do not enable is the mindset or culture to accept and implement the feedback coming from these loops.

So how do we prepare ourselves, as individuals, teams and as an organization, to accept last minute changes and be calm and creative in the event of it?

The one-word answer to that is “Culture”. As a management guru rightly said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” and that is the challenge we are trying to make Agile every day!

Naturally, Agile recognizes the importance of culture and has a sort of “culture guide” right at the outset which is known as the “Agile Values and Principles”. These are 12 points which provide sufficient and necessary guidance for assessing and aligning organizational culture to “being Agile”. Here I list only a couple of these principles

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

You can find the complete list of principles here: Twelve Principles of Agile

These 12 principles have been successfully put to test for around two decades, by various software development organizations around the globe. It is therefore not a surprise to see that so many organizations want to “transform” to agile. The flip side of this rising trend is that many organizations only consider “doing Agile” and so never reap the full benefits.

When followed in spirit Agile organizations tend to have astounding results. For this Agile transformation must involve imbibing cultural change into every strata of the organization.