What is Agile?

The term Agile is thrown about a lot... but what is Agile?

Agile is a way of addressing complex changeable problems in complex changeable environments. It came from software development, but due to its adaptability it soon was adopted in many different areas of business and even many different areas of life! This is because of it's flexibility, using these principles will allow you to tackle almost any complex problem.

In the old days, when I worked as a software developer it was standard to be late with delivery, we delivered products which we thought were right, but the customers interpretation was totally different from what we thought it was. We could spend weeks creating features which were never used. And at end of the project it was commonplace to have to rush to get everything finished, which meant shitty code, and lots of bugs...

Even when we gave the customer exactly what they'd asked for on time and on budget, so much time had passed that the customer was only half interested, they were more interested at getting us started on their next great new idea. This approach was barely working, and it was demoralising for the whole team.

This way of working is typical where we have a fixed scope mindset. We take on a lot of work, or requirements, these all have to be delivered to the customer a month, 3 months, a year, or whatever in the future. We plan for weeks, we do the work, and towards the delivery date we panic and rush to complete everything.

Agile is the solution. It has allowed us to create the thing the customer wants most, while everything changes, it has quality built in so no rushing, and we can deliver it quickly, very quickly. We're talking days or weeks, sometimes even hours, with a happy customer and very few problems.

Software is one application of Agile, in software it works. But by using the same processes and tools, complex deliverables in any area can be addressed, which means you can confidently deliver exactly what your customer wants piece by piece, very quickly.

So, why is this important to get things done quickly?

Agile will not help you get your work completed faster, or get more of it done. It's not a magic bullet for project delivery, or a shortcut for hard work.

To be Agile is exactly what it sounds like, to be able to change direction quickly and easily while constantly delivering value. As a member of any team you can see people wasting time, but you step back and let them learn. You've probably had customers asking for the most ridiculous things that will take weeks to complete and you know they just won't work. And how many projects do you wish you hadn't even started, after you come out of your second emergency meeting trying to work out why you are weeks late!

Agile is built to addresses all of these things. We cut out all the waste to focus on what is immediately important.

In the world today, people don't have six months to wait for things to happen, they want your product or service now. If you can't deliver it soon, they're going to go elsewhere... even if you think they can wait and you take months to deliver something the entire market may have changed and those projections you had 6 months ago go up in smoke.

What is Agile... well, it is not only a different way of working, it is a different way of thinking.

How does Agile work?

Everything you do in business will usually follow a process of some description. A marketing campaign, a sales pipeline, recruiting for call centre operators, cooking food in a restaurant, if you're organised you will have a process, if you're not organised there's probably still a process. This is from some form of raw material, or entry point into your company that is processed to produce a result to a satisfied customer.

The smaller the process, visibility of the process and control over each element in that process, the easier it is for you to see if you've done it right, or where you can improve. The customer tells you the steak is overdone, it's easy to fix it.

A large project will usually have a large process or multiple processes, but ultimately this equates to a long time passing between when the project is started and when the customer gets their product. If it's taken six months to deliver what the customer wants, and they don't like it, it's gonna be hard to fix.

What Agile does is crunches the deliverables of this big project into a small timeframe, typically 1-4 weeks, with a preference to the shorter timescales.

This is when you say, 'We can't deliver six months work in 2 weeks, it's not possible'. No, we can't, what we can do is crunch the process, we optimise it to a point at which we can take one thing the customer wants from start to end in that 1-4 week period. We don't spend weeks planning the project, we spend hours identifying the thing the customer wants most at that time, we validate it, we plan it, we build in the quality at the start, and we pull it through the process, laser focused on doing just enough work to ensure that thing gets delivered. No more, no less. Then we repeat.

This is known as incremental delivery, we deliver a small piece of value completely, as quickly as we can. We then inspect what we have delivered, inspect the process, re-align with the customer to understand what they value most next, validate this is correct and get started on delivering again.

This can't work for my Company\Industry\Project...

Hands down the most common response to an introduction Agile, 'This sounds great for software, but it couldn't possibly work for my Company\Industry\Project'. Ironically a majority of traditional software companies have the same kind of response 'This sounds great for cloud software, but it couldn't possibly work for my desktop based system', 'This sounds great for Saas applications, but it couldn't possibly work for my finance systems'

Without the shift in mindset I agree, it isn't possible, but this is usually nothing to do with the industry or project you're working on. The application not easy, I never said that, but is in most cases, is possible. The cool thing is, even if it doesn't work, the processes and practices that have been created around Agile will streamline your efforts and more than likely substantially benefit your business.

If you think Agile can't work for you, that's fine, that's totally your call. But ignoring the benefits of being able to confidently deliver exactly what your customer wants, on time, every time? To be able to get a return on your investment every week or 2 weeks easily? Could that help you as a business? Is it worth spending a little time trying to understand how this can work for you? On the face of it, it seems impossible, believe me, it really isn't.

When Agile doesn't Work

Bottom line is, you can't be Agile without an Agile mindset.

Because Agile is a radical change often people look for ways to dismiss it 'This can't work because of X', without giving it a chance, or they hand it over to a team to try something without gaining the knowledge themselves.

• If management don't understand the mindset, you can use the tools and the frameworks, they will help with process, but you're probably not Agile.
• If the team don't get incremental improvement and incremental delivery, you're not Agile.
• If you're scrambling to deliver a product after weeks of work, you're probably not Agile.

Conversely, you can already be working with an Agile mindset but not realise, if you dig and look into these ways of working, you will find you're actually using some of these principles already, it's not rocket science. But the more you dig, the more you will benefit.

The uber cool thing about it, and why I work as an Agile Coach is an Agile adoption doesn't have to be a big change, in fact it shouldn't be a big change. We can flip this mindset and make you your own customer, and the product you're delivering is to improve your understanding and application of this mindset. What big change do you need to make this happen... well none, you make little changes, incrementally.

Agile addresses complex changing problems in complex changing environments. Why not use an Agile framework to prove Agile will work for you? With the minimum effort possible, and measurable results?

Agile can do this. Agile was designed for this.