Is it finally time to “Be Agile”?

As I look across the Agile landscape, I am worried that Agile has become little more than a superficial tag that some teams and companies seek without really aligning with the cultural shift that is needed to truly become Agile.  What I mean by this is to really align with Agile, it means to understand and embrace the Agile Values and Principles.  While this sounds obvious, I believe there is such little focus on the values and principles and much more so on the mechanics. 

I have hypothesized that those involved in Agile are more knowledgeable about the mechanics of “doing Agile” than understanding the cultural aspects needed for “being Agile”.  My specify hypothesis stated that I believe fewer people could name 3 of the 12.

As I look across the Agile landscape, I am worried that Agile has become little more than a superficial tag that some teams and organizations seek without aligning with the real cultural shift that is needed to truly become Agile.  What I mean by this is to really align with Agile, it means to understand and embrace the Agile Values and Principles.  While this sounds obvious, I believe there is such little focus on the values and principles and much more so on the mechanics. 

I have hypothesized that those involved in Agile are more knowledgeable about the mechanics of “doing Agile” than understanding the cultural aspects needed for “being Agile”.  My specify hypothesis stated that I believe fewer people could name 3 of the 12 Agile Principles, then could roughly name 3 of the 5 Scrum events (i.e., Sprint, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective).  In order to make my hypothesis meaningful, it was important to test it. 

With that in mind, I established an experiment that tests if people can articulate the Agile principles and if they can articulate the Scrum events.   I created a simple survey that asked Agile participants to write down as many of the five Scrum events that they knew and then write down as many of the twelve Agile Principles they knew.  I distributed this survey to two different Agile professional events and accumulated over 100 survey responses (109 to be exact).  The results were quite revealing and support my hypothesis.  Of the 109 Agile participants: 

• 59% knew 3 or more of the five Scrum events
• 11% knew 3 or more of the twelve Agile principles

I actually find these results quite astounding.  Could it really be true that only 11% of Agile professionals and enthusiasts could name just 3 Agile principles?  I don't mean they they memorize them but can provide at least the key words of the principle.  This means that 89% could only name 2 or less.  What makes this even more astonishing is that 67% could not name even a single Agile principle (and I did give credit to those who could name the key words of the principle - e.g., self-organizing,  frequent delivery, etc.). 

In reviewing the survey results, about half of the 67% confused the Agile principles with the Agile Values (e.g., Individuals and interactions over processes and tools).  On the flip side, 59% could name at least 3 of the mechanical Scrum events.  Here are two charts that illustrate the number of respondents that could name a certain number of Scrum events and Agile principles. 

Based on this data, my concluding hypothesis is that the reason there is such a lack of awareness of Agile principles is that there is very little education focused on the Agile principles.  This is particularly concerning since the principles form the basis for what an Agile culture should look like. A simple way for each and every one of us to test this hypothesis is to ask these two questions:

• How many Agile principles can you name?  Is it 3 or more?
• How much Agile related education have you have received and how much of it was focused on the Agile principles? 

Now do keep in mind, knowing the principles is just the first step and it doesn't make you Agile. Next its time to live it.  But how do we expect to “be Agile” if our focus is so much more focused on the mechanics or “doing Agile”.   I would suggest that anyone who claims to be an Agile enthusiast ought to periodically bring their work back to the Agile values and principles.  Maybe its time to revisit the values and principles and understand what it really takes to be Agile.

Agile’s Little Secret – It Makes You Money

Agile tends to be introduced at the team level and it’s the Agile teams who are expected to adopt Agile.   While there is various amounts of buy-in from management, some don’t seem to understand that it takes an organization to embrace Agile in order to gain the business benefits.  In other words, management has a strong role to play including adapting their behavior, embracing the Agile values and principles, and leading a culture change, in order to gain the business benefits of Agile.  It requires significant buy-in to achieve a culture change.  But this doesn’t always seem to happen. 

Some of this is not management’s fault.  Part of the issue is that Agile gets introduced to them is various ways – as a way to improve productivity, as a way to speed up development, as a way to increase quality, but in most of these cases, those introducing Agile to them fail to mention the significant buy-in they need to make.  While each of these ways have different levels of merit, it often doesn’t convey enough of a reason for management to motivate a change in their behavior and their organizational culture.    

   

How about changing the message?  Though there are many benefits for going Agile, it occurred to me that to get serious executive/senior management attention and buy-in to Agile is to give them a reason that is near and dear to their heart.  Explain to your management that Agile can increase revenue—in short, it can help them make money (or more of it).  In my experience, this gets them to actively listen, versus the passive listening they may exhibit when they think Agile is an engineering method or something the engineering team and others must do.

Yes, Agile can lead to an increase in customer sales, ergo an increase in revenue. This is all true if the organization is truly allowed to “be Agile”.  This means that teams continually demonstrate working software to customers and they are allowed to continually adapt their requirements to customer needs.  Then teams can more closely align with what customers find as valuable.  The more value customers see in your products, the more likely they will buy (or buy more).  Maybe, just maybe, if you convey that Agile can make them more money, they will listen and buy-in to what it really takes.