Wait.. what do you mean Agile?
The Many Flavors of Agile
With every organization, you might find they have their own flavor of agile. While this isn’t terribly alarming, the question should be posed “what do YOU mean agile”?
Since there are a number of great artifacts such as the agile manifesto, modern agile, the agile alliance, and others. We need to understand where each of these organizations congregates towards so we can speak their language and help them on their journey.
Agile Frameworks
If an organization has adopted scrum for example, does that make them agile? For someone who is joining that organization and has no point of reference to compare to, it might seem that the organization is using the scrum framework and calling themselves an agile organization. This can be detrimental to someone who has had very little exposure to agile as a mindset.
Generally, if they take this experience with them throughout their career, they can easily more damage than good by highlighting tactics and not an agile mindset through values and principles.
What Does Agile Mean to you?
I was speaking with a Director of Software Development about a project that was in desperate need of qualified developers to join the team and stay without being pulled off to work on side projects. This Director assured me that we would have all the people we need to get the work done, but could not promise they would be staying with the team for more than a week or two.
Since this project required a more stable commitment than a dev here and a dev there, we could not reasonably say this project was going to be a success. The Director’s understanding of agile was that change was welcomed even if it meant changing the team up from week to week.
I thought about why he was needing to pull developers off the project every couple weeks and just couldn’t understand the actions that were being taken if the project was indeed a high priority (all projects are high priority to some) then why would they sabotage their own project?
An Idea
I had been paying attention to the startup scene during this time and one thing that was really popular was the concept of StartupWeekend. I had done similar aspects of this throughout my college years was sure this could potentially be applied in this particular scenario. Since we were only able to keep the same developers for a week or two, we needed to find an operating cadence that allowed us to maximize our use of the developers we were loaned and still provide the value to the stakeholders.
The concept worked like this: We broke development cycles down into two days and gave a demo every two days of work completed no matter how little. Each Friday we would use as a catch up day to work on anything that we needed to get done before the next two day cycle the following week. We kept all the scrum ceremonies in our cycles but adjusted the sprint to match our needs.
We developed on-boarding assets that helped us provide a quick rundown of the product, process, and road map. When someone joined the team we would have them sit next to another developer for the entire first day and by the end of the day they would be releasing code into the test environment.
The team started to develop their own identity as the Change Agents since they were always changing and were really motivated by the startup weekend mindset where you just come together and try to build something awesome in a time box. The team took pride in demonstrating the product to stakeholders and would celebrate the wins by throwing a potluck lunch each month.
The importance of the culture being developed on the team, even though the team kept changing was paramount. The willingness to welcome change and not get discouraged when a more experienced developer had to leave the team was the catalyst that drove them to succeed.
Agile Outcomes
As it so happens, projects come to an end. The project ended up being a success and delivered on time and on budget. The team was more experienced in different approaches to work and would be able to take that experience with them. As the culture, transformation, and leadership of the organization as a whole were left unchanged, the team was changed and the Change Agents exhibited their own flavor of agile to help the organization succeed in the future.
Sometimes it takes just a few superheros to help get the job done. They have to accept and be willing to go where no one else will go to do it. The project was not about changing the organizational culture or transforming leadership, it was about the mindset of a few developers.
