Modern Agile — Ultra light guiding principles that might actually work
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak” — Hans Hofmann
We have come a long way. We have faster, simpler and safer way to deliver products using agile principles. Yet, the problem with mainstream agile can be that it can become quite bureaucratic with all the enterprise tools and scaling frameworks. Besides, most agile frameworks like Scrum are aimed at software product development. The principles and terminology can be confusing for other business verticals. It can be quite frustrating for these business verticals trying to adopt agile.
Modern agile has no particular roles, responsibilities or frameworks. Instead it provides four ultra light guiding principles that can be applied organisation wide. The four principles are
Lets briefly explore these principles
Modern Agile suggests that we endeavor to make everyone in our ecosystem awesome — including those who use, make, buy, sell or fund our products and services. Sounds cliche but done properly can have a great impact. Organisation with awesome employees creating products and services that ensure clients will feel awesome can have a profound impact on long term success of the business.
For example using rear view camera and parking assist makes me pretty awesome at parking in tight spots :).
Create a culture that provides a safe working environment both physically and psychologically. An environment where people are not afraid to fail or speak up. Safety is a basic human need and a key to unlocking high performance. Modern Agile elevates it to a prerequisite, a foundational ingredient for success.
Time and time again, we have seen success of experimentation that can lead to increasing our knowledge quickly even if it is a failed experiment . You would want to make your experiments “safe to fail” so the organisation is not afraid to conduct more of them.
Experiment & Learn Rapidly is a guiding principle of Modern Agile because it protects us from wasting time and helps us discover success faster.
“Human-powered flight was once an unsolved problem. In 1959, a wealthy businessman offered a large cash reward to anyone who could pilot a human-powered aircraft around a one-mile, figure-eight course. For 18 years, no one did. Then Paul MacCready entered the challenge. He considered what had been tried and declared, “The problem is we don’t know what the problem is.”
MacCready then engineered a process by which he could iterate safely and rapidly on the problem of human-powered flight. He and his team used aluminum tubing, mylar and wire to quickly produce experimental airplanes. The airplanes flew so slowly and so close to the ground that crashing was safe and fixing the airplanes was easy. Whereas his competitors took weeks or months between test flights, MacCready and team attempted flights, failed, learned, adapted and experimented again all in a matter of hours. Within a year of first attempting human powered flight, he and his team succeeded with the Gossamer Condor.
Paul MacCready is widely considered to be one of the greatest engineers of the 20th century. Failing fast and safely was integral to his success.” 1
One of the key issues I have seen is the lack of delivering of value to the customers as early as possible and continuously. Many organisations can build and deliver working software every two weeks with continuous integration and deployment capabilities. Yet they fail to deliver the product in client’s hands. Delivering value continuously enables us to experiment and learn rapidly and this feedback loop is critical to the success of the product.
Changing the organisational focus to these 4 core guiding principles can have a significant impact on the long term success. If this is achieved then no matter what agile framework the organisation has implemented, it will ensure the full potential of agile being realized.
1: Joshua Kerievsky — https://www.infoq.com/articles/modern-agile-intro
More info: http://modernagile.org/
