THE TECHNICAL AND SOFTWARE PERSPECTIVE
What is agile? Ask 100 agilists and you will probably get 101 answers. I can give you half a dozen definitions myself, but none are comprehensive. And agile is a moving target, too, it changes. In order to answer the question I need to know why you are asking.
For me, the hallmark of agile is learning. Agile organisations are learning organisations. Normally, when one says organisation one means company, maybe a hospital, maybe a charity, or maybe just a team.
Once upon a time agile was inherently associated with software development. Software development may always be the home of agile, but it no longer defines agile. Agile has slipped the leash, it is out there in the big world. Changing the big world.
Agile was a response to the problems that much information technology (IT) work – particularly bespoke development and internal corporate work – faces. Using such an approach, the originators drew on what was seen to work at the successful companies – largely software vendors.
And it is important to emphasise the seen to work. Agile, as we know it today, began life in the patterns community. The patterns community values existing knowledge, the capture and sharing of this knowledge. Not best practice – that term implies the practice cannot be bettered and someone somewhere has decided what is best. Rather, just good practice that is seen to work, repeatedly. Those values have been handed down from the patterns community to the agile community. Those values are embodied in this book.
What Belinda has captured here are practices that have been seen (with her own eyes) to work. Some of these practices are taken directly from the software world, some have been adapted, and some have come from elsewhere. In this book she gives her answer to the question: ‘Can agile work outside of software?’
These practices are described not in dry abstract terms but in the places they are seen and used. In the real world – in actual businesses, in actual teams, in real, non-software businesses.
At its simplest, agile is about practices. You can pick up this book and adopt a few agile practices. Certainly agile can be seen as a toolkit from which to choose. In doing so, you might make your team better, you may relieve a pain point or two. But will that deliver the state of being agile? No.
To be truly agile requires a state of mind, a mindset that informs every decision. An agile state of being takes more than following a few practices.
As Woody Allen might say, ‘Agile without the mindset is an empty experience but, as empty experiences go, you’ve got to admit, it’s one of the best.’ A little bit of agile can make you better but, if you embrace agile with your mind as well as your body, it can make you world-class.
Being truly agile is a mindset, a culture and, ultimately, a business strategy. Right now, the best tools known to deliver that state are in the agile toolkit. Why might you want to be agile? Well, that is a question you must answer for yourself.
Finally, Belinda’s stories are refreshing because they are from outside software; she works outside of software and she is outside of the usual agile names. In a way, this book could be written only by someone like Belinda, because it needed to be written by someone outside of software, someone who understands IT but does not live IT.
My hope – my mental model of agile adoption, in fact – is not that you read a book and have agile epiphany. But, rather, that you read this book, you try a few things, you find they work, you are enthused to try some more, learn some more. The process repeats: the more you learn, the more you try; the more success you have, the more you do. Of course, you have the odd failure along the way, but the good is enough to keep you trying. The hard bit is not learning to be agile; the hard bit is unlearning old ways that may have brought success in the past.
Learn and be prepared to unlearn and, one day, you will have the agile mindset. Agile is no longer a good, albeit empty experience, it is fulfilling and there can be no going back.
Allan Kelly, author of Xanpan, Team Centric Agile Software Development; Business Patterns for Software Developers; and Changing Software Development: Learning to be Agile.