Agile is simple. Stop Complicating it. Please.

Let’s not make this more complicated than it needs to be

At its core, the concept of being “agile” is simple — I condense it to just four steps: prioritise, do something, get feedback, iterate.

The agile mindset is based on the premise that we don’t know all the answers up front. If you do know all the answers up front, and you know everything that will change in the future, then you have no need for “Agile practices”. It will waste your time.

But if you don’t know all the answers up front, then it is impossible to plan everything at the beginning. Therefore, we have to work a lot of it out as we go along.

If we have to work out things as we go along, then we need to get some sort of feedback to see whether we are doing things right. To get feedback, we need to do something to base feedback on. Given that there are a load of unknowns, we should probably start with the most important thing, to make sure we get that right first. So let’s put the things we think we need to do in priority order, do the important thing, and then get feedback to make sure it is taking us in the right direction. That’s the first three steps right there.

Once we have that feedback, we can then decide whether we need to redo what we’ve done, or whether we should add on the next most important thing, i.e. we iterate.

That’s it. That’s all it is. Yes it is prevalent in software development, but it’s relevant to everyone. It is relevant to process and to product. It’s relevant to personal relationships and it’s relevant to organisations. It’s relevant to anything that has uncertainty.

And yes things like sprints, cross-functional teams, Kanban, backlog refinement, post-its, demos, XP, continuous delivery, SCRUM, BDD, retrospectives, WIP limits, user stories and stand-ups are all useful tools or methodologies to help you work in an agile way. But none of them make you agile on their own. You definitely don’t need to do any of them*.

So please remember, to be “agile” you do not need to do anything apart from these four steps:

• Prioritise
• Do the most important thing
• Get feedback
• Iterate.

Do that, to your process and your product, and you’ll find navigating uncertainty gets a whole lot easier.

And if you want help, do get in touch.

* Please do retrospectives of some sort 😉

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