Agile Beyond Software
A question that has been floating around these past few years is taking Agile beyond software. This is interesting as the Agile Manifesto and Principles seem universal enough to apply beyond software, and frameworks like Scrum are simple enough to make it work.
I thought there is value in sharing my observations and focus points through the years with regards to this.
Focus on the Intent
We had a topic on Agile Horror Stories (#Hugot) during an Agile Philippines meetup a few months back. The best I could come up with was “I was part of organization, and we decided to adopt Agile”.
Becoming Agile requires changing your organization, and frameworks like Scrum help you to do so. Changing your organization is difficult, and re-designing it is all about the trade-offs that needs to be made. Your intent influences these trade-offs.
Common ones are to do things faster, or to cut costs, or to maximize efficiency. We can realize these, but aiming for these directly results in behaviors that are interestingly counter to Agile. Agile deals with uncertainty in a complex world through flexibility and nimbleness. This leads to valuing learning by doing, through small increments of value delivered continuously.
Focus on the Fundamentals
Agile and Scrum are full of terms and jargon that we take for granted. And I only became aware of this recently. Take for example the “Product Backlog”: this was seen as a Bad Thing, and I realized that the term “backlog” already means something outside of software development.
While I make use of the Scrum framework as a means to become Agile, I found it more effective to focus on the Agile Manifesto, as well as the Twelve Prinicples of Agile Software. I do have to rephrase some of the statements lightly, but the idea that we are finding better ways of doing our work by doing it and helping others do it resonates well.
In Scrum specifically, I find explaining things like the Sprint Backlog as your plan for the sprint, and the Daily Scrum as a re-planning meeting on your plan, makes it easier to relate to beyond software.
Focus on People
In the end, Agile is about people. I simplify the manifesto as the people doing the work are in the best position to improve it. Organizations are used to separating the thinking from the doing, which does not maximize the potential of everyone in the organization. This is where the impact really comes from, tapping each and every person in the organization to move the entire organization forward.
Scrum Teams are cross-functional. The entire team must have all the skills to be able to do the work: skills, not necessarily all the roles or all the people. In software, we do this by ensuring skills such as analysis, programming, testing, architecture, deployment, etc. are all in one team. This allows teams to deliver increments of valuable work, and allow them to be agile in the way they work.
Next step would involve skills beyond software development, such as such as marketing, finance, operations, and services all in the team. This seems to work the other way around as well, when organizations beyond software start including software development skills into their teams and make them more agile in the process. Different starting points to the same destination.
I realized that these focus points are true both for organizations in software and those beyond it. Yes, the nature of work is different, but the fact that we deal with people and a complex world is the same.
