Much Ado About Agile

It’s striking how the agile movement, a grassroots, bottom-up phenomenon, has built such strong momentum over the last few years. Agility is a concept whose time has arrived. Several hundred IT professionals came together in Vancouver last week to listen to speakers and share their thoughts and experiences related to the practice of agility. The conference was titled “Much Ado About Agile” and hosted by the non-profit group Agile Vancouver.

As recently as four or five years ago, the agile movement made executives very nervous; agility seemed like a radical notion that threatened traditional concepts of efficient operations and good project management. But what was once radical and new has been field tested, iteratively improved upon and shown to be highly effective. Now corporate executives, IT vendors and government officials are all using the agile word (clearly an idea whose time has come…). As standard practices of the 20th century become increasingly inadequate to deal with realities of the 21st century, agile practices in IT and business offer the best way forward.

 
(Agile Vancouver logo and view of Vancouver from my hotel room)

Agile and Lean Words of Wisdom for both IT and Business

The two keynote speakers, Martin Fowler and Mary Poppendieck, delivered presentations that highlighted agile and lean concepts and their implications for how we develop systems and operate businesses. Martin Fowler talked about the great divide between agile operations and traditional plan-driven operations that focus mainly on predictive planning and put process before people.

The reason for the long planning cycles in the traditional waterfall approach to developing software comes from the idea that if you study a situation long enough you can find out everything you need to know about that situation and plan for how to address those issues. In the planning process you lay out the sequence of actions you will take and in doing so you create a process that is the most efficient way to get everything done that needs to be done. This is the mindset that is so famously summed up by the saying, “Plan the work and then work the plan.” Once the planning is done a process is defined and that process is to be followed at all costs – process first, people second.

In an agile approach, the emphasis is on adaptive planning not predictive planning. The agile approach starts with the notion that you cannot find out everything you need to know about a situation no matter how much up front planning you do. So instead, you do a little planning and start work on the first piece of the system. You put people first, not some predefined process. And as the situation unfolds and you learn new things, people on the project engage in a constant process of self-adaptive planning and response. He said this is summarized by the notion that “perfect” is a verb (as in to perfect your plan) not an adjective (as in to create the perfect plan).

Mary Poppendieck added further insight to these ideas by describing procedures followed by organizations that have adopted lean methods for guiding their operations. She pointed out that in lean organizations people are treated as professionals, not as “resources”. Front line people are highly valued; they are trained and trusted to do the right thing and given the autonomy and authority to make decisions and act in the company’s best interests. She listed some companies that are great examples of how lean and agile companies work: Gore-Tex; Nucor Steel; SAS Institute; Semco SA; Southwest Airlines; Svenska Handelsbanken;

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