Agile is not a tool! If you ask google about “agile”, it will tell you agile is an adjective that means “able to move quickly and easily”. And, just as a check, if you ask Wordhippo about the contrary to agile you’ll get terms like clumsy, apathetic, inactive, lazy, lethargic, lifeless, rigid, slow, sluggish, stiff.
This tells us that we all should do our best to be agile.
Organizations want to be flexible in order to adapt to business change. They want to build new products and services without waiting for months or even years, while knowing that the final product will work. Agile development aims to address these needs.
In software development the concept of agile was popularized in 2001 by the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development”. (https://agilemanifesto.org/)
Despite the simple structure, based on 4 key values, in the last 19 years we have seen too many companies fail in leveraging the benefits of Agile. Why?
We believe that Agile is working better if your team is small. If you have ever opened a mechanical wrist watch you know how difficult it is to synchronize many small moving parts, especially if you need these parts to move quickly.
Organizing your work in “Sprints” is not enough to guarantee you’ll be quick.
When you have a blueprint for your project the most important thing is to get all team members to communicate and collaborate.
If you simply try to force Sprints as a way to split the job into smaller tasks and get them done quickly you are using Agile as a tool.
This is the same mistake many wanna-be photographers make when they believe that buying an expensive camera is what you need to take good pictures and become an artist.
“If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.”
— Eve Arnold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Arnold)
In your project you should get rid of all the parts that undermine your team collaboration efforts and avoid to fail the first value of Agile: “to value Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.
