First agile movie director Sebastian Schipper

Can Hüzmeli
3 min readApr 21, 2016

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I just read an interview of Sebastian Schipper, the director of the movie “Victoria” which was shot in a single night. This part of the interview sounded exactly what an experienced agile coach would say; “As their director I could not own what they were doing, couldn’t tell them to smile a little more, smile a little less, talk a little louder, be a little funnier. I was more like a coach and less like a director”.

I have always considered agile as a project management approach only related to software development processes. However the more I experiment on it, the more I think it is useful in any kind of production. In one of my previous articles I mentioned the death of waterfall but it was focused on software development projects. As I had the chance to work with non-software related projects in the last couple of months, I learned the importance of agile practices and their effects in these projects too.

Incremental progress in magazine production

3 weeks ago I met a magazine producer and learned more about her story. She started by placing free leaflets about fashion and see which locations people were more interested. Then started to observe who would read it, keep it and who would throw it away quickly. She also interviewed people about the content of the leaflet.

With all the feedback she received, she started printing 6 page-brochures. This time she was giving them directly and interviewing everyone taking it with one or two simple questions.

After a while she ended up with a complete magazine, still giving it for free to the ones who just fill a form with contact details. Basically she took early adopters on-board during her development process and ended with a potential customer base. Now she is planning to go online because she has enough number of emails to send newsletters to.

Agile in food business

It all started when I saw an old friend’s facebook posts about cooking burgers in his garden and serving it to people for free. I was curious about it because he gave it a brand and he was doing it like a serious business. But all he was doing was to grill some burgers and give them for free. He started to experiment different ingredients, he started to grow his audience and attract friends of friends. That’s how he started his career in gastronomy and he is pretty successful in it.

Going agile or agilish for different industries?

I understand that some of the basics of agile manifesto can only be applied to software development, in the end it is called, Manifesto for Agile Software Development. However businesses should read the agile manifesto and put it into implementation to solve the problems by creating their own methodology on how to implement it.

Pictures:
http://threebrothersburgers.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/burgers-724x478.jpg
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6QzAA4qEGqs/maxresdefault.jpg

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Can Hüzmeli
Can Hüzmeli

Written by Can Hüzmeli

I intend to grow leaders, help leaders create teams with high standards while establishing a culture of fairness, autonomy and mastery in an enjoyable workplace