Agile enables organizations to master continuous change. It allows companies to thrive in a world that is becoming increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
Agile is the ability to create and respond to change. It is a way to cope with an uncertain and turbulent environment and eventually succeed.
Until recently, Agile was viewed as a set of management practices related to software development. This is because the first advocates of Agile were software developers, and its foundational document was the Agile Manifesto, written in 2001.
The emergence of Agile as a broad global movement that extends beyond software stems from organizations’ discovery that the only way to cope with today’s turbulent customer-focused marketplace is to go Agile. Agile enables organizations to master continuous change. It allows companies to thrive in a world that is becoming increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
Evolution of Agile
The Agile Manifesto of 2001 reflected the views of visionary software developers who believed that uncovering better ways to develop software would require reversing some of the fundamental assumptions of 20th-century management. They valued individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiations, and responding to change over following a plan.
However, there were many new questions that were not explicitly asked in the Manifesto:
- Can we create workplaces that use all the talents of employees?
- Are these capabilities focused on providing exceptional value to the customers and other stakeholders to whom the work is done?
- Would those who receive this unique value be willing to offer a generous reward for it?
- What will these workplaces be like? How will it work?
- How will it align with existing goals, principles and values?
- Can they work at scale? If so, would these answers have implications not just for software development but for entire organizations?
In 2001, no one really knew the answers to these questions. Software developers began learning through experimentation. As with anything new, things went smoothly, with frequent setbacks. Many variations in applications have been investigated. Even if the practices were essentially the same, the approaches often had different labels.
Previously, experiments were conducted with a selected team in the organization. As some of these experiments became successful, the experiments expanded to groups of teams and eventually to very large-scale applications, even entire organizations, and other industries such as manufacturing. Some organizations born Agile, such as Riot Games and Spotify, have grown rapidly and continue to be managed according to Agile principles and values.
For several years, it was difficult to understand what was going on. Even some adopters of Agile have found it to play a limited role in simple software activities, especially in small units or organizations where reliability is not an issue. Many teams and companies that claimed to be Agile were Agile in name only. Some have argued that as Agile expands beyond individual software development teams, it will inevitably evolve into traditional hierarchical bureaucracy to achieve efficient and reliable management at scale.
But over time, it became clear what worked and what didn’t. The result has been a striking convergence from traditional management to a family of goals, principles and values that is demonstrably more productive and responsive to customer needs.
Agile is a Mindset, Not a Methodology
Agile is a mindset for those who live it and practice it on a daily basis. Agile is not a methodology to be implemented only within the framework of current management. Agile is a significantly different framework for management itself. In a community of Agile practitioners that now numbers in the hundreds of thousands, Agile begins with a different perspective on the purpose of the organization.
As the Agile Manifesto states, the highest priority is to satisfy the customer.
Seeing Agile as a methodology to be implemented only for the benefit of company shareholders eliminates the revolutionary feature of Agile. Agile loses its value when used solely as a methodology within the existing management framework.
Agile involves more than learning about a new management methodology. Agile is a culture change for the entire organization.
What are the advantages of Agile?
- It produces higher product quality as jobs go through continuous testing and improvement in small batches.
- It results in higher customer satisfaction as a result of improvements being continually demonstrated to customers and customers remaining constantly engaged.
- Increases control over projects through continuous communication methods such as daily Scrum meetings.
- Risks are reduced through continuous adaptation to customer needs and preferences throughout the product development process.
- It delivers faster ROI because it focuses on business value, allows the customer to prioritize features, and creates a functional, market-ready product in just a few iterations.
Agile Practices
The article “Embracing Agile” by Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland and Hirotaka Takeuchi in the Harvard Business Review is a turning point not only in the history of Agile and its main variant, Scrum, but also in the history of management.
According to this article, the six practices of Agile are:
1. Learn How Agile Really Works:
While some managers associate Agile with an order where everyone does what they want, others interpret it as doing what they say faster. But Agile is neither.
That’s why exactly how Agile works should be clear in our minds without leaving any room for questions.
There are several varieties of Agile that have a lot in common but emphasize slightly different things. These are Scrum, which emphasizes creative and adaptive teamwork in solving complex problems; Lean Development, which focuses on the continuous elimination of waste; and Kanban, which focuses on reducing lead times and the amount of work in process.
Being aware of the advantages that Agile provides to organizations will motivate people to understand how it works.
Some advantages of Agile are:
- Increased team productivity and employee satisfaction
- Minimize waste
- Improve visibility
- Constant adaptation to customers’ changing priorities
- Improved customer engagement and satisfaction
- Entering the market quickly
- Reduce risk
- Expand organizational experience
- Building mutual trust and respect
- Freeing senior executives for higher value work
- Prioritizing strategic initiatives
- Simplifying and focusing work
- Assigning the right people to tasks
- Increase cross-functional collaboration
- Removing obstacles to progress
To capture the value of Agile, organizations must thoroughly understand how Agile works.
2. Understand Where Agile Is Appropriate:
Agile may not be a valid option in all circumstances. Some of the conditions for which Agile is suitable include:
- Problems to be solved are complex, solutions are not known at first, and product requirements change over time.
- Modularizability of the job
- Close cooperation with end users and rapid feedback
- Presence of creative teams rather than command and control groups in the organization
These conditions exist for many product development units, marketing projects, strategic planning activities, supply chain challenges, and resource allocation decisions. They are less common in routine operations such as facility maintenance, purchasing, sales calls and accounting. Because Agile requires training, behavioral change, and often new information technologies, managers must decide whether the expected returns justify the effort and cost of a migration.
Achieving the full value of Agile depends on managers themselves consistently embodying the Agile mindset in all their words and actions.
3. Start Small and Let Word Spread:
Large companies often launch change programs as major efforts. But although there are some exceptions, Agile starts with a small group and then spreads throughout the organization. Those who create a success story in Agile are eager to tell this story to others working in the organization, and thus Agile culture becomes widespread. Generally, successful practices that start in the IT unit then spread to another unit with the coaching of the original practitioners in these groups.
Effective deployment of Agile is possible with a clear and consistently supportive attitude from senior management – which should be practiced all the time, not occasionally. Because the key to achieving fundamental culture change is strong and sustained support.
4. Let Experienced Teams Personalize Their Apps:
Students of Japanese martial arts, especially those studying aikido, often learn a process called shu-ha-ri. They study proven disciplines in the Shu state. Once these are mastered, they enter the ha state, where they begin to branch out and modify traditional forms. Once these are mastered, they enter the ha state, where they begin to branch out and modify traditional forms.
Agile is similar to mastering innovation. Before starting to change or customize Agile, an individual or team will benefit from applying widely used methodologies that have proven success in thousands of companies.
Over time, experienced practitioners should be allowed to customize Agile practices.
5. Apply Agile at the Top:
Some senior management activities are not suitable for Agile methodologies. Routine and predictable tasks such as performance reviews, press interviews, and visits to factories, customers, and suppliers fall into this category. However, for the most important activities such as strategy development, resource allocation, innovation development and organizational collaboration development, Agile methodologies are suitable. Executives who come together as an agile team and learn to apply discipline to these activities reap far-reaching benefits. Their own productivity and morale increase. They speak the language of the teams they empower. They experience common challenges and learn how to overcome them. Agile teams recognize and stop hindering behavior. They learn to simplify work and focus. Results improve, increasing trust and engagement across the organization.
6. Break Down Obstacles to Agile Behaviors:
Direct everyone towards the same goal.
Different teams can work simultaneously to solve large and complex problems. Not all of these teams use Agile processes. All teams should be able to act according to the same list of organizational priorities, and non-Agile teams should not create obstacles for Agile teams. Otherwise, Agile innovations will not be able to find their place in practice. Eliminating barriers is the most important responsibility of Agile practitioner management.
Change roles, not the structure of the organization.
Many managers assume that creating more cross-functional teams will require major changes in organizational structure. This is rarely true. Highly empowered cross-functional teams, by definition, need some form of matrix management, but this first requires different disciplines to learn to work together simultaneously rather than separately and sequentially.
Specify only one boss per decision.
People can have more than one boss, but your decisions cannot. In an Agile operating model, it should be very clear who is responsible for assigning a cross-functional team, selecting and replacing team members, appointing the team leader, and approving the team’s decisions.
Focus on teams, not individuals.
Research shows that although the intelligence of individuals affects team performance, the collective intelligence of the team is even more important. Agile teams continually develop their collective intelligence by clarifying roles, teaching conflict resolution techniques, and ensuring team members contribute equally. Shifting metrics from output and usage rates to business results and team happiness is also helped by recognition and reward systems that weight team results more than individual efforts.
Lead with questions, not instructions.
Instead of giving instructions, leaders in Agile organizations ask “What is your suggestion?”, “How can we try this?” They should prefer to give guidance with questions such as.
