Entropy in Agile

All the drama with so many things may go wrong *or not.

Agile is a hot topic in recent years, it’s trendy and loves itself while designers love it too or totally hate it.

The thing about agile is that it looks so much like successful people in real life. I mean through the centuries the people who always survive were those who could adapt easily to changes in their environment. Agile between others is about adaptive planning, evolutionary development, continuous improvement, encourages rapid and flexible response to change.

Agile targeting complex systems and projects with dynamic, non-deterministic and non-linear characteristics make it more susceptible to downsides. Of course you know that Agile’s governed from rules and principals but the whole self-organized character is those things that enters entropy.

You know entropy, is defined by a measuring disorder, whose maximum value reflects the total disarray. Let’s just avoid all the mechanics’ definitions and thing about entropy the way my teacher explained it to us, in Systems Theory class, back at the time I was studying. So lets picture entropy on the simplest ever way and lets thing about a five year old left alone in a room for 30 minutes. If you are a parent you probably already know the condition of the room after that time. In any case I guess you can imagine.

Back to Agile now. Recently I read an article listing a way too big list about all the disadvantages of Agile. The truth as I mention at the beginning is that there are a lot of designers who really can’t deal with it. People might find that Agile as a philosophy is fine but what really happens on a daily routine when you use it is at least hard.

What might be entropy in agile? What would this child do if left alone? In Agile there are so many people involved and all those relationships makes it looks exactly like a complicated System. In complicated systems harmony and ataxia are involved. Today I am taking a brief look to the dark side of Agile.

The first thing on my list would be the psychology of the team plus the client working together everyday. While the client is there watching your dirty laundry, all the process step by step from the very beginning, the team might feel that have to overeact and to keep a balance. Especially at the part of early releases. The thing that constitutes the highest advantage of the philosophy might also be a sensitive issue. Early releases gives to team and the client an early-stage result and this might work as a discouraging phase of the process. In both situations the solution is given from people. In the team there is the need of people with high emotional intelligence to relieve conflict from time to time.

The last will be about remote coworking spaces. In manifest of Agile is mentioned that team works together every day. The thing is that agencies nowadays have offices in different places around the world, having a small team there that have to cooperate with the rest, or what is even more common is that clients are from different locations which directly breaks the form about working together from the same space everyday.

So all this years taking a closer look to how agencies applying Agile, I see that theory is a bit different than action. Agencies create their own rules based on a common way contracted to Agile. If you need to avoid all the entropy just fit it to your way. After all in Agile although there is a lot of planning you don’t figure everything out from the beginning. A lot of things may go wrong or differently than the expected because you cant control everything but still taking that risk applying the most vivid work philosophy still worth it.