Saturday 13 September 2014

You're Agile ... really?!

One really easy way to determine if you are doing Agile or not is to ask if part way through the project, the company could release what you've done so far and start making money from it. Not whether the business will; whether it could.

And as those who know me personally have heard me say many times, ... There is a big difference between big-A Agile and little-a agile. You can be 'agile' without being Agile, but you can't be Agile without being agile.

That for me is what is at the heart of a lot overly complicated answers I see on the web. As apparently said by Albert Einstein, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." And based on what I've read about Al in the past, 'simple' refers to how complicated something is, not how complex it is, and being able to describe something so everyone can understand it at some depth.

If you want to be truly, over the top successful in business these days you need to understand and build towards the MVPs (minimally viable products) from your customers' perspectives; not yours. Customers' needs change over time so adaptability built into your development practices whether you're creating software or anything else. That said ... remembering all the while that your customers may not know what exactly it is that they want. That's why you're here. (see / Google Henry Ford and Steve Jobs quotes)

Want change because your company doesn't do that well? Adopt new habits and eliminate old routines. Meaning that if all you do is slap agile labels on the way you've always done things, or worse, apply the parts of Agile that align to how you currently think and ignore the rest you might as well be teaching a pig to sing. As the idiom goes "it's a waste of time and all it does is annoy the pig". 

That's my rant for today ... maybe I'll have the where-with-all to read some more 'Agile' (or is that 'agile') spam in my inbox after I take the dogs for a walk. :-)