Moving fast has nothing to do with Agile
Agile sucks.
The way most teams do Agile sucks.
Agile has been around for longer than I’ve been in the industry. In 2001, a group of middle-aged engineers signed The Agile Manifesto.
I spent my days hauling a beige box with a 17” CRT to LAN parties back then.
Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament were the games of choice, and we played with more lag than we’re now used to online because everyone copied pirated movies.
Ahh, the good old days.
I started on the web in 2008, and Agile was gaining momentum. It was cool. If you didn’t do Agile, you were stuck in the past.
The trouble was that not one company I worked for adopted the principles of Agile.
Like delivering valuable software early and continuously to meet customer needs.
Close collaboration between business stakeholders and developers.
Welcoming changing requirements.
Self-organizing teams.
All concepts that I find extremely valuable.
Most companies adopted Agile frameworks like Scrum, Knaban, and XP, not the core ideas behind Agile.
Even worse, in most cases, they just picked a few practices from Scrum, like estimation poker, sprints, and retrospectives, migrated to JIRA, and declared proudly: “We are now Agile!”.
Therein lies the problem.
You can’t follow a framework without the mindset.
You can’t be Agile in just one department (tech).
The organization must adopt an impact-first culture and continuously deliver value with tight feedback loops. That’s what it means to be agile.
The rest is just a show.
I believe most dissatisfaction with Agile or downright hate comes from those poorly implemented frameworks in organizations that preferred to stick to old ways.
It’s impossible to point a finger at who is to blame.
However, I know from experience that when an organization asks me to help with their tech team, we usually need to go one level beyond and adopt an agile mindset at the core of the business.
It’s the only way that works.
Best regards,
Taj
P.S. What’s your relationship to Agile? Let me know. :)