I’ve heard people say, “We started using Jira and GreenHopper, so we’re Agile now”. Similar things are said of Rally, VersionOne, LeanKit, TargetProcess, etc. In making those declarations, it’s clear that they don’t understand Agile at all.
At its core, Agile is a set of Values and Principles:
….
· Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
· Working software over comprehensive documentation
· Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
· Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Underlying these is a mindset with a focus on self-discipline, self-organization, and adaption to change.
The Practices of Scrum (Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective), the Roles (ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and Development Team), and the Artifacts (Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, and Product Increment) only help the team support the principles and achieve the goal of delivering working software.
Electronic tools (Task walls, Development Environments, …) or physical tools (Task walls, …) are only useful in so far as they provide support for those principles and practices.
If your Agile adoption starts with a tool and a scattering of practices, then the whole point has been missed and the core – the essence – of Agile needs to be carefully reviewed until that is obvious.
Mark Levison has been helping Scrum teams and organizations with Agile, Scrum and Kanban style approaches since 2001. From certified scrum master training to custom Agile courses, he has helped well over 8,000 individuals, earning him respect and top rated reviews as one of the pioneers within the industry, as well as a raft of certifications from the ScrumAlliance. Mark has been a speaker at various Agile Conferences for more than 20 years, and is a published Scrum author with eBooks as well as articles on InfoQ.com, ScrumAlliance.org an AgileAlliance.org.
I really agree with your post. I’ve seen a lot of times people that say : “we are agile, we have a scrum meeting every day”. But after that is just “emptyness”, they don’t know even the minimal principles about agile, is just fashion.
Good work!
Thanks Fernado – its sad we see “Zombie Agile” the good news is that the people involved would probably welcome some coaching and support in becoming more effective.
I love it when a team has a “stand-up” meeting once a week with fourteen people where two talk and they discuss the project status while sitting down. Sigh.
I’m not sure if I should laugh, cry or ask if they want coaching 🙂
While I agree that the core of agile has very little to do with tools, it is much easier to get started with small practices and tools than directly trying to change the core values behind how an organisation operates.
In my experience transforming an organisation to agile usually starts from practices and tools. Demonstrating value for these early helps to speed up the larger and much slower transformation of values.
Indeed an organisation is not yet agile just because they’ve adopted a scattering of practises, but with the right support in place they may be already headed to the right direction.
Vesa – we will have to disagree. When you start with an electronic tool you will do things in the way the electronic tool suggests without always giving it sufficient thought.
I’ve noticed that teams that start on simple tools (index cards, google spreadsheets, …) figure out what matters to them first. Teams that start early (first 4-5 mths) with an electronic tool wind up doing things that the tool offers (i.e. tracking task hours) that probably don’t help at all.
We don’t seem to disagree, we are simply talking about different things here. 🙂
I’m talking about starting to do a daily without proper agile values. Or having a physical scrum board on the wall. Simple tools and small practices before going all in with proper agile values.
Any software for running a scrum process always limits the process improvement. Unfortunately distributed teams can’t work without any digital tools, but I would never recommend starting with any kind of digital tool. Physical tools are much better for learning and improving.