I was listening to the Agile for Humans podcast this week
featuring Steve Denning, and he spoke about a topic that I’ve either heard or
read about several times over the last several months. In all cases, it has
been some form of “Is Agile Dead?” or “Is it time for the Agile Manifesto
2.0?”. It kind of triggered this idea in my head which is, has Agile become the
new normal?
Humans go through change continually. What ultimately
happens is that at first, the change makes you uncomfortable, but with time you
adapt to that change and it slowly becomes comfortable, or the new normal
(think weight lifting, a new diet, starting a running program, learning a new
skill, etc.). Normal isn’t by itself a bad thing. However, throughout the
history of mankind, we have a track record of revolutionary new changes that
over time become distorted.
In his book “1984”, George Orwell tells the story of a group
of farm animals who are fed up with the farmers living off their hard work. At
first, they overthrow the humans and begin to celebrate their new found freedom
and all is great! Eventually, though, the pigs move into the house and slowly
begin making small changes which the animals reluctantly accept. Before you
know it the pigs have become indistinguishable from the humans they once fought
against, and the rest of the farm animals fight to drive the pigs off.
In colonial America, the colonists were fed up with the
British and had a slogan of “No Taxation without Representation”. Eventually,
in the American Revolution, they overthrew the British government and formed
what we now know as the United States of America. Yet a little over 200 years
later, most Americans do not feel the politicians in Washington have their best
interest at heart and instead act in their own best interests. Those in
Washington seem all for passing policies that help them stay career politicians
that live lavish lifestyles compared to the average American. Both sides of the
aisle advertise changing Washington for the average American, but rarely do we
see that.
Now Agile is obviously not a political upheaval, but there
are some parallel storylines. A group of individuals that were fed up with the
waterfall way of doing things got together and said, “There must be a better
way of doing things.” They wrote the Agile Manifesto and frameworks such as
Scrum, XP, Kanban, etc. started to form. Software was developed more quickly,
developers had more fun building the software, and everything seemed to be
great in the world of Software Development. However, somewhere along the line,
we once again started polluting Agile and in some cases, it became about
checking things off a checklist to say we are Agile. It became “Doing Agile”
instead of “Being Agile”.
I’m fortunate in that I have never worked in a formal
Waterfall environment, and for the most part, the company I work for is pretty
good at Agile (some teams better than others). However, I have still witnessed
projects that although described and worked in the name of Agile, sure do
resemble the waterfall projects of old. I will often hear comments from
developers and business people alike made in the name of Agile, but that show
they don’t seem to truly understand Agile. It’s as if they have taken the Agile
buzz words and then started using them to describe old behaviors; as if calling
the behavior by a new name will change it and make it more Agile and less
Waterfall.
If you look up the definition of Agile, you’ll find
something along the lines of “able to move quickly or easily.” The whole point
of being able to move quickly or easily though is that it allows you to put
software in front of a customer sooner, and LEARN from it. The key to doing
Agile is that you should be continually trying something, inspecting it, and
learning from it.
We hire knowledge workers [Software Engineers] that make
salaries well above the national average, but in many cases, we don’t let them
actually do what they are hired to do. We ask them to do more and more in terms
of delivering new features, give them very little time to really think through
a creative solution and learn from the software they are building, and we do
this all in the name of Agile.
If you really want to be
an Agile organization instead of just being an organization that does Agile, throw out all the checklists and
buzz words and focus on becoming an organization that experiments and learns.
Provide a real problem from your customers and allow your knowledge workers
time to really think about the potential solutions and then iterate on those
solutions. Try something, show it to your customer, learn from it, rinse and
repeat.
So what do you think, has Agile become the new normal?
