On Agility

We spend so much time focusing on how our teams can be agile. There are methods and books and classes and certificates and tons of arguments online about the pros and cons of one way versus another. Whats the point of agility? Why is agility the goal? Are you sure you actually want that?

Theres some fear around moving Not Fast Enough among software teams. Someone else will beat you! Theres also the reality that you probably work for a company that is spending more money than it is bringing in, so every day you spend time on the Wrong Thing, every sprint you “miss” by a couple days, every quarter where you don’t hit the sales numbers or don’t ship that feature is gone and you’re now one quarter closer to having no more money. 

Agility is purported to be the solution. React to new information quickly! Shift gears and focus to the right thing instead of the wrong thing now that we have the new information! Think about the smallest work you can do to have the biggest impact! In my opinion, these are all great targets to aim at for small venture backed teams. But is the way you are running agile actually enabling that? When have you ever actually changed goals mid quarter or shifted the team to focus on something new out of a normal “sprint cycle”? 

There seems to be two Actual Outcomes when some new piece of information is learned. The worst outcome is that you and your team treat the new thing as the most important thing and also don’t actually agree to stop working or focusing on the other in-progress stuff. You only have so many times you can tell your team that this new thing interrupting their current work is the Most Important Thing before they either stop believing you or stop believing themselves. 

The other outcome (the one I think is the funniest) is that your “agile” method literally prevents you and your team from shifting gears because the process you’ve put in place is too rigid. “We can’t just add an extra week to the current sprint, we have all the meetings already scheduled.” “We can’t just do a random grooming meeting before we do our sprint planner, that’s not how we do this!” 

I don’t really have a diagnosis for this problem. I think we need to think about if we actually want to be Agile or not. I think it’s ok to not be, but we should just be honest about it because then we can actually build a process that enables us to do the right work. I think some projects probably require a specifically non-agile way of planning and executing the work. I think if we do want to be agile, we need to be more agile about The Way We Do Agile.