I hear with a certain frequency "here we apply agility very well, we do all the routines", and I see even more frequently companies drowning in these same routines, with the same member having to participate in 3 daily's, each of them lasting 45 minutes. The manifesto preaches individuals and interactions, not individuals and meetings. But the practical application goes far beyond simply "organizing a planning" or "organizing a delivery review."
One of the richest reflections I've had in my mentoring is precisely of the importance of the right side of the agile manifesto. Individuals and interactions more than process and tools, working product more than following a plan....Note that agile arises from a nonconformity with traditional management models, focused on a massively predictive model. PMI gets balled on the back as if it is the traditional model but that is a fallacy that needs to fall apart. The first PMBOK guide came out after the first publication of practices such as Scrum, Crystal, and Extreme Programming, back in mid-1996, only four years before the Agile Manifesto, i.e. there wasn't much traditional about it.
But this so-called "Traditional" to which the manifesto opposes is not an entity, but a management model, which saw people as machines, or as "the best assets of your organization". I often joke that Agilists are an orthodox sect of Lean, so serious that they have recreated the whole model of thinking focusing exclusively on customer delivery. They are so orthodox that they write their action plans the same way the customer orders, embracing all the complexity from a personal and partial point of view, learning to navigate through the subjective to create an analytical logic, and from there extract important data for process improvement.
But that's where the catch is: you can only improve a process that exists, a product only works with a minimum documentation for collaboration and interaction, collaboration with the customer occurs after a contract is formalized, and so on.
I've heard a lot in my career people surprised by my bringing a delivery plan when starting a project with practices such as Scrum or Kanban, or even when I brought a risk analysis with a containment plan, or when I mapped an existing process for the team to act with incremental improvements. The list goes on and on...
Agility is a management area, which can be used in operational practices as well as in projects, in technology as well as in construction, in development as well as in HR.
What happens is that the technology market has grown exponentially in the last few years, and it was necessary to create professionals very quickly, and with this the market was filled with preparatory courses in "agile management" where the only thing you see of agility is Scrum, and even then only its routines. And looking to improve the experience of the students, the trainers focused on dynamics and colorful murals, with several different themes, and left much of the content aside.
I say this as a trainer and as a recruiter, several times during interviews I see professionals who didn't go beyond the basics of "planning, daily, review, and retro", or who risk talking about a CFD but barely know how to identify the process patterns that the chart shows. As a trainer, I see students who come in with multiple certifications but have never seen agile in practice, or else one-practice agilists.
There are literally hundreds of agile practices and dozens of well-established practices, most of which do not even have Daily, Review, Planning and Retro, and sometimes they even have a standardized meeting. Most focus on innovation techniques, with simple, lean interactions with the sole purpose of improving the delivery of value to the customer. Out of this come innovation management techniques, quality management, human resource management, communication, benefits management, planning, budgeting, and many, many others.
The truth is that agility is pragmatic, empirical, if your team resorts too much to "by the book" or throws all their chips in meetings - and not interactions - it is very likely that you are seeing a theater of agility, and not agility in practice.
Commentaires