Are You Being Agile, or Just Running the Ceremonies?
Your team holds a daily stand-up. It works in two-week sprints. It has a board with sticky notes and a retrospective on the calendar. So is your organization agile? Not necessarily. Agile is a descriptor, an adjective meaning adaptive, nimble, flexible, responsive, and lightweight. Meetings alone do not make a team any of those things. This article covers:
- Telling going agile from being agile
- Learning from the marshmallow challenge
- Spotting faux agile
- Testing yourself honestly
Telling going agile from being agile
When a critical deadline looms, your instinct is to go agile. Formality goes out the window, you roll up your sleeves, and you solve problems quickly, practically, and in descending order of necessity, making sure the most critical work gets done.
Being agile is different. You no longer need an emergency to work that way, and you no longer set unreasonable deadlines to force focus. Instead, you accept that people are practical problem solvers and build the work around that. When you think of agile, think healthy.
Learning from the marshmallow challenge
In this team exercise, groups of four have 18 minutes to build the tallest free-standing structure they can from 20 sticks of spaghetti, a yard of tape, and a yard of string, with a marshmallow on top. Young children usually build taller and more interesting structures than adults:
- Children build incrementally, on a series of structures that already stand up.
- Adults spend most of the time planning, produce one final version, and then run out of time to correct their mistakes.
The lesson is that big bang development, meaning excessive up-front planning and a single shot at creating the product, does not work.
Spotting faux agile
Faux agile is the appearance of agility over the same old system. The warning signs include:
- Agile in name only: existing practices renamed with new agile terms.
- Agile for software only: development changes while finance, human resources, and leadership do not.
- A stalled journey: leadership declares the organization already agile and moves on.
- Agile lite: the ceremonies happen, but the mindset behind them never arrives.
Testing yourself honestly
Agile Project Management For Dummies offers a litmus test of 12 questions drawn from the agile principles. Three of them make the point:
- Does what we are doing at this moment support the early and continuous delivery of value?
- Can we maintain our current pace of development indefinitely?
- Do developers self-organize and self-manage, and do they have the freedom to succeed?
Answer “yes” to all 12 and you are probably becoming more agile. Every “no” is a prompt: what can you do to change that answer?
Ceremonies are easy to copy, and a mindset is not. Becoming agile is less a destination than a journey, so the useful question is not whether you have arrived but whether this week found you more adaptive than the last.
Ready to learn more about agile project management? Check out the book or take the course.
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