Agile can be great if it’s treated with respect

As a practitioner in AgilePM, a professional Scrum Master and working in the role of an Agile delivery manager, I don’t consider myself an expert. If I did I would probably remain lost in the sea of Agile experts. There are a lot. Although I’m unsure exactly what an expert is. Feel free to let me know if you have any insight.

I have mentioned before the belief that many people who consider themselves ‘Agilists’ do so to fit into the crowd without really getting the point. Another misconception about ‘Agile’, is its simplicity! It’s a piece of cake… Go away for a couple of days or a week on a course and the little bit of knowledge starts to open up the possibility of what it can produce. It it’s no secret that it can be an incredibly valuable method / mentality / idea / thing / whatever… It certainly seems to work well in a development / software environment, but it is far from simple when it comes to implementing it.

When you look at it as a Scrum team or other small team working towards a valuable product, it looks pretty simple, and those diagrams do a good job of making it appear simple, but that is their job.

The problem is though, ‘Agile’ does not operate in a sterile bubble, where communications are controlled on rails and everyone knows exactly what they and their whole team are doing down to the minuscule detail and management sit in their offices comfortable that the scrum team is producing immense value every iteration.

If only it was that simple…

Now, I don’t have the solutions for you, I told you I’m not an expert, all I do know is that I have looked at an organisation in. the past and said to myself, “Agile would really work well there!”, and then the real work begins. You don’t have to have a vision as to how it will ultimately look, because, the point is that true ‘Agile’ adapts to and around the team, as long as it’s understood and respected enough. I mean, have you ever truly thought about exactly what an empowered team looks like? It’s about the loss of control and ultimate trust, mountains of trust and that subject is a blog post in itself.

How many times have you managed a team that was a carbon copy of the team before?

Thats right and the primary reason a lazy, formulaic approach to ‘Agile’ will be doomed to fail, it will never get to perfection for more than a moment and some dynamic or other messes with it.

It will always and constantly need attention and love to succeed. It’s just not simple to organise a group of human beings into a performing team by just reading a few pages in a text book. It’s a challenge, a rewarding challenge at times, but a challenge all the same..

But, you know what? It might just be worth that effort…