Why is Agile crucial to industries today? I hear people use it as the new buzzword. But what is Agile? It’s an amalgamation of many other different development practices that keep in line with specific values, but that’s not all.

The Agile Manifesto is a set of values and principles that, if followed well, allows companies to respond to the changing needs of their market/users in a very quick fashion while keeping sunk costs and risks down using iterative development and short feedback loops with their users. It also allows sustainable development practices so talent doesn’t burn out.

In my experience, many people (and companies) stop right with iterative development aka sprints but there’s actually more, this is why having Agile Coaches are important to keep Agile Transformations aligned. In fact, what I’m about to write it is a huge part of why the manifesto was written..

The iterative development should focus on utilizing Agile development practices to ensure teams and the company as a whole are a learning organization. A growth mind set, a collaborative mindset and keeping the human aspect alive is key to really honing in Agile practices. Per the manifesto’s website itself, Jim Highsmith discusses Agile.. “as a way to deliver products to customers by operating in an environment that does more than talk about ‘people as our most important asset’ but actually ‘acts’ as if people were the most important, and they lose the word ‘asset’. They were tired with the traditional fixed process mindset that frequently plagues the industry. Jim goes on to say that ‘This type of situation goes on every day—marketing, or management, or external customers, internal customers, and, yes, even developers—don’t want to make hard trade-off decisions, so they impose irrational demands through the imposition of corporate power structures. This isn’t merely a software development problem, it runs throughout Dilbertesque organizations’”.

There is a lot more to Agile development than just timeboxing sprints. Sprints are just a container so the definition of Agile doesn’t stop there but elaborates that we become lifelong learners and share the knowledge and truly work together so we move faster. While there are “dedicated roles” in agile we want to break away from traditional “lanes” where knowledge is locked up within individuals and kept so only individuals can move forward, this is siloed work. A true team experience we share our knowledge so everyone understands the work better and can give better insights to ways to work and improve; we call this T-Shaped skills, and teams move together. We share knowledge by using agile development practices such as pairing and face-to-face discussion. You also want to have motivated individuals who not just focus on getting the product out quickly but creating quality, innovative and sustainable work. Let the workers close to the problem come up with the solution and leadership should trust them to create innovative solutions.  We create that trust with leadership by becoming predictable and having continuous transparency with leadership and teams. Keep the discussions open from top to bottom. Teams create quality work by always having their Definition of Done (DOD)and utilizing such Agile development practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and Automated Testing.

So, in a nutshell Agile isn’t just working in time-boxed sprints it’s also about face to face human interactions from the top down, sharing the knowledge and work of the teams to become a learning organization, growth mindset, quality Agile development practices, allowing those closer to the work make decisions and faster feedback loops to align with the proper end result. It is a mindset change from traditional management & corporate practices. Yes, there is much more to this but I’m trying to simplify what is usually missing in Agile Transformations.  You can go to the Agile Manifesto if you want to learn more it’s all there.