A fresh perspective on the agile principles

The Agile Manifesto is a beacon for how we can improve adaptability, productivity, team well-being, and customer satisfaction. However, with the chaos and complexity in today’s world, I thought it worth reviewing from today’s context.

I’ve written before about navigating the polarities expressed in the 4 value pairs of the manifesto itself. While these values and their underlying principles are celebrated for their timeless impact, applying them can be hard, which often means they are used less and less. This article seeks to reaffirm their relevance while suggesting how we might apply them pragmatically today.

I’ve reframed them using the three lenses used when crafting them: customers, management, and the teams doing the work. I’ve also simplified the wording of the principles to make them applicable to more than software development.

Customer focus

The first four principles provide a solid foundation, advocating a strong customer-centric approach:

  1. Constantly delight the customer
  2. Adapt to changing customer priorities
  3. Frequently deliver customer value
  4. Fully collaborate with customer

They focus on customer satisfaction through frequently delivering outcomes that meet requirements and delight customers, setting the stage for a dynamic and responsive development environment. The emphasis on close cooperation fosters a culture of collaboration and mutual understanding, ensuring that the end product not only meets but exceeds expectations.

Enlightened leadership

Principles five through eight focus on the role of leadership in making this all work:

  1. Aligned autonomy
  2. Regular direct communication
  3. Outcome over output
  4. Sustainable pace

These highlight the importance for leaders to set clear goals then keep out of the way, providing the technology and space for clear ongoing conversations, and ensuring that progress is at a rate the team can sustain.

By creating an environment based on trust, empowerment, and open communication, leaders set the foundation for a culture of innovation, courage, productiviry, and long-term well-being.

Team productivity

The final set of principles focus on the teams themselves:

  1. Quality matters
  2. Keep it simple
  3. Self-organisation
  4. Reflect and adapt

These advocate for continuous attention to quality and good design, avoiding over-engineering solutions, bringing decision-making into the team, and making time to reflect and improve.

These principles are also the backbone of how teams achieve agility, ensuring that teams are not just executing tasks but are also engaged in a continuous cycle of learning and improvement. Meanwhile, encouraging teams to organise themselves fosters a sense of ownership and accountability, crucial for agile success.

Connecting the dots

While each principle is important in its own right, they were never designed to be taken in isolation. When learning the agile values and principles, we often ask teams to rank the importance or difficulty of principles, as if some are more important than others. In basing any approach on these principles, we should avoid having to trade them off against each other. There are deliberate connections between the principles, some reinforce and some bring balance. So, ideally, we should maintain a blend of them all.

The synergy between delivering valuable outcomes and embracing change underscores the commitment to customer satisfaction. This ensures that products evolve in alignment with customer needs, which fosters innovation and adaptability.

The interconnection between empowering and not overloading teams, and fostering open communication is pivotal. It not only enhances efficiency and clarity but also ensures that the team’s morale and motivation remain high, directly impacting the quality and timeliness of the deliverables.

The combination of self-organization and continuous improvement is a testament to the agile philosophy of growth and adaptability. By reflecting regularly and adapting where needed, teams not only enhance their processes but also contribute to the overall agility and resilience of the organization.

The need for teams to own their decisions is reinforced by ensuring alignment and autonomy. Asking teams to have autonomy only works where there is enough psychological safety for teams to experiment and try things out without fear of repercussions when their ideas don’t play out.

Finally, the focus on technical excellence is balanced by the call for keeping things as simple as possible. This ensures we only do as much as we need to meet the requirements and delight, and do that to the best of our abilities, meaning solutions are not only effective but also sustainable.

Towards a pragmatic hybrid approach

This interconnectedness between the principles aimed at customers, leadership, and teams lays the foundation for a pragmatic hybrid approach. In today’s complex environment, a one-size-fits-all methodology is not only impractical but ultimately ineffective. By understanding the core essence of these principles, I believe organisations can craft an approach that combines planned programs, iterative and incremental development, and a continuous flow of small requests.

Such a hybrid model acknowledges the diverse nature of work and projects within an organisation, and allows for flexibility and adaptability based on context:

  • the majority of our initiatives will likely flourish with an iterative & incremental approach, and the time out for planning and reflection brings plenty of benefit
  • some work will best be handled as a continual flow of service requests, triaged and resolved one by one, without little overhead
  • and—while it may seem heretical to say this—certain initiatives may still benefit from a more structured, planned approach (what some would call waterfall)—although we would still apply these principles

The key lies in understanding the unique context and settings required for each initiative and leveraging these principles to guide decision-making.

Conclusion: A call to action for modern leaders

As we reimagine these principles for today, it’s clear they are not just guidelines but also a call to action for leaders, teams, and organisations. By embracing a customer-centric approach, enlightened management practices, and fostering team agility, we can navigate the complexities of modern business with confidence and creativity.

Moreover, adopting a pragmatic hybrid development approach allows for the flexibility and adaptability necessary in today’s fast-paced world.

In conclusion, while the Agile Manifesto and its twelve principles continue to be a source of inspiration and guidance, perhaps their full power lies in our ability to reinterpret and apply them to our current realities. As agile practitioners and leaders, let’s commit on our journey of continuous learning and adaptation.

Notes

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