I’ve decided to take a plunge and have proposed a session for XPday . It’s a world cafe version of the open discussion about Compromised Agility that I ran at the inaugural Agile Practitioners Forum . The aim of the proposed session is to debate whether adaptations that compromise values and principles actually degrade a team’s agility, impacting their ability to deliver successfully. It would be appropriate for anyone who is working, or who has worked previously, with agile methods regardless of their level of experience. Here’s the description of the session:
Teams stand a better chance of realising project success when they demonstrate agility, i.e. the ability to deliver value to customers in a continuous flow realising maximum return on investment for the business while dealing with change in a rational and empirical way - and having fun doing it.
The aim of this session is to debate whether common adaptations, imposed by organisation or culture, degrade a team’s agility, preventing the team from being all it can be and impacting its ability to deliver successfully.
Achieving agility isn’t easy. It’s partly about process and practices and yet its capability is rooted in the culture and mind-set established by the underlying values and principles. Agility requires awareness, discipline, sound judgement and courage, plus a trusting and empowering environment that understands small failures to be important learning experiences that drive continuous improvement. Often teams focus on the process element and the practices or adapt things before they’ve even tried them. And, in the name of adaptation, compromises are made to maintain a fit with the organisation structure, corporate culture, command-and-control environment or current working practices. The freedom to do the right thing is an important part of being agile. Do compromises lead us to do the wrong thing? Do compromises that undermine the values and principles always lead to compromised agility, i.e. a degraded capacity to deliver value to customers because flow is interrupted and return on investment is diminished?
Many organisations, despite trying to be agile, still see their projects fail. Why? In many cases I believe they are practicing compromised agility (a.k.a Corporate Agility). Perhaps they don’t understand the cultural aspect of what is required to achieve success using an agile approach. Or perhaps they lack the conviction to bring about the organisational changes necessary to give a team a fighting chance of achieving agility.
In my opinion, compromising the values and principles, to make Agile more acceptable to the organisation or apparently easier for people to perform leads to compromised agility and nurtures an accepted mediocrity that increases the chances of project failure.
My yardstick for agility, and whether it’s compromised, is the following ‘handbook’:
VALUE
IF you’re repeatedly releasing software
into the production environment
at least once every month
that realises value for your business
and satisfies your customers…
QUALITY
IF you’re paying constant attention to technical excellence
with simple, effective, incremental design
driven by continuous, repeatable automated testing
with at least 95% coverage…
LEARNING
IF you’re learning
by inspecting and reflecting every iteration
and you’re re-planning, adapting and improving
all of the time based on what you’ve learned…
TEAM
IF your team is empowered to self-organise and be creative,
sits together and engages in face-to-face communication,
includes your customer
and all the necessary skills to make its own decisions and take immediate action…
THEN YOU HAVE NOT COMPROMISED YOUR AGILITY
