Finding Common Ground In Agile Interpretations
Written by Mieke Storms-Wiegel
Tommy’s Agile Center of Excellence is rapidly growing. Although we’re only halfway through 2019, our team of Agile coaches has already increased from four to six people. While our expansion is exciting, we also realize that with more people comes a greater need for alignment. For this reason, we organized an off-site meeting with the goal of aligning the team and answering the vital question: what is Agile?
A Barrage Of New Terms
Nowadays we are overrun with buzzwords like “Agile,” “Lean,” “DevOps,” “Scrum” and so on. However, the general understanding of these hot-topic terms is often inaccurate. For example, the terms “scrum” and “Agile” are often seen as one and the same. This is, in reality, a huge misconception! Agile is a mindset that focuses on customer value and adapting to change (amongst other priorities), whereas scrum a framework for how you can actually implement this.
Since most new teams in Tommy’s Agile Transformation are being formed as scrum teams, it’s understandable that many associates are making the assumption that scrum equals Agile. In order to avoid further confusion and misinterpretations, we decided that it was important to stop and align — because only when Agile is perfectly understood within the team, can we spread a clear message across the organization.
Where Is The Room For Interpretation?
The Agile mindset is derived from The Agile Manifesto, a document that outlines four values supported by twelve principles. This probably sounds like something of a science, with little space for one’s own interpretation. However, we found out that every coach has his or her own unique background and experiences. And although we all have the same knowledge of The Agile Manifesto, we sometimes put our focus on different Agile elements.
Getting On The Same Page
As a first step in completing our goal, each team member was asked to share their vision of Tommy’s Agile Transformation. We were encouraged to dream about the ultimate success of Tommy’s Agile Transformation, imagining how it would change Tommy Hilfiger as a company.
We each presented our visions as news items on the cover of a major publication, completely in style with headlines and quotes. It was great to see our ambitions — all big, and varying from becoming the first Fashion Technology company, to applying blockchain, to having the highest employee satisfaction rate due to Tommy’s global implementation of Agile.
Creating A Shared Definition
To achieve these ambitious visions, we of course need our CEO to understand Agile! Therefore, the next task in narrowing our understanding was to create an elevator pitch explaining Agile to our CEO in two or three sentences. After three additional rounds of evaluating, adjusting and optimizing the many definitions, we came to a final, shared definition of Agile at Tommy Hilfiger:
“Agile is a mindset that enables you to adapt to change quickly and deliver great value to the customer by continuous collaborating and experimenting.”
There it is! Defining Agile in just one sentence took us half a day (which sounds like an incredibly long time). But by doing this, we took a major step towards establishing our Agile strategy and purpose.
We look forward to making more strides, and sharing our progress and lessons learned along the way.
