What is the essence of Agile?

This is the question any individual, team or organisation thinking of adopting agile needs to be able to answer first!

Too many agile implementations are based on tools and recipes, yes; Scrum / XP/ Kanban are agile tools. On their own, they won’t make you agile and focusing on the recipes and processes they prescribe on its own won’t bring you to the goal of extreme business value.

Coaching many teams and many organisations in South Africa and listening to the comments when training numerous organisations on Agile, it is clear to me as an Agile coach that individuals and organisations want the benefits of Agile, however, still want to grab a silver bullet like Scrum or XP or DSDM etc.

Agile tools won’t make you Agile, they are not silver bullets, they are purely tools to assist your agile implementation in a structured, well organised manner.

To really understand the issue at hand, we first need to admit that the problem we are faced today is people and not technology.

Once you admit this, then you can take the first step towards realising the benefits gained from an Agile approach.

A lot has been written on ‘Cargo-Cult Scrum’, I would like to take it further and name it ‘Cargo-Cult Agile’. This is where organisations or teams reach for Agile tools and hope that by following the simple rules and processes prescribed by that tool, that they will experience rapid benefits.

Then the organisation or team fails and keep failing and eventually they blame Agile, however, they never addressed the essence of Agile!

The problem we face is people, not technology!

Most organisations or teams implementing Agile have some debt to pay before they can even think of reaping Agile benefits, yet, most of the time, this debt is ignored and it’s an elephant in the room no-one wants to talk about, yet, everyone knows its there. Easier to ignore, than to admit the elephant is taking up all the space you need to be truly Agile…

So, when I talk about debt to be paid, what am I referring to?

3 types of debt:

Knowledge debt:

Agile is built around teams, yet teams can only perform as fast as the slowest member. The knowledge gap between individuals making up a team needs to be addressed and fast. This is where Agile tools do play a role with ceremonies like planning as a team, daily co-ordination meetings, reviews and retrospectives. Yet, by having these ceremonies without the true context of paying your knowledge debt, these ceremonies are again an empty shell without real value.

Technical debt:

The first thing to an Agile implementation is that Quality is non-negotiable. This usually sounds fantastic and provides everyone with a warm and fuzzy feeling; from now on we are only going to deliver high quality products and faster as we are now agile…

In reality the opposite is true, we work towards quality, but we deliver slower and this is due to technical debt…

Because of the quality standard which we will not negotiate on, there is no room for quick and dirty development, let’s face it, it is the quick and dirty development without proper refactoring which caused the technical debt in the first place…

An organisation or team would need to understand that they would need an aggressive approach to pay their technical debt as quick as possible. This will cause a dip in productivity during the first period, but the productivity will increase exponentially after a short time…

If there is no aggressive approach to paying technical debt, you will not produce higher quality faster and sustainably and then you will blame Agile…

Requirements debt:

Over time many organisation build up requirements debt. Requirements debt is all those things we never have time for, or the bug list we never get time to get through, or the loooonnnggg list of customer requirements we just don’t get to deliver.

Paying this debt is extremely important; this is why you want to embrace agile, isn’t it?

However, one cannot pay requirement debt effectively if one does not pay both knowledge and technical debt first. In other words, if you pay knowledge and technical debt, then you will be able to pay your requirements debt as your bug list will reduce and not grow as fast as it did, you will therefore have time to deliver customer requirements, you will deliver faster yet your quality will not reduce etc…

Summary:

Any agile implementation is not about tools and recipes and process, it’s about people and the way they communicate and collaborate, paying your debt and most of all establishing a culture or habit of always looking for ways to reduce waste and improve as a team and organisation.

This takes courage, great communication, fantastic collaboration, trust between all involved, loads of effective feedback, a habit of breaking everything down to its simplest form and an approach of testing yourself and the way you work against the agile principles!

So, what is the essence of Agile then?

The essence of Agile in short is to do whatever it takes to establish an effective learning culture and to adopt an effective approach and implement complimentary tools to support continuous learning on your projects and within your organisation.

Accept the essence of Agile first, then the rest will fall into place and you will not lose the agile plot by focusing on tools, ceremonies, artefacts etc, but rather embrace all that to support your culture of learning in order to effectively deliver extreme business value!

Regards

Arrie van der Dussen

Agile Business Manager / Agile Coach

Kaizania

agile@kaizania.co.za