Tom Breur
4 January 2015
Agile leverages shorter cycle
time by helping you learn more and quicker from experience. Adopting Agile
implies engaging in frequent, almost omnipresent experimenting. Agile is not a
handful of things to “do” that will return magic overnight. Instead, as a team
you collectively embrace a mindset of gathering evidence about what it is you
need to do, how you can collaborate most successfully, to create as much value
for your customers as you can.
An “always and
continuously improve things” (“Kaizen”)
attitude is crucial for succeeding with Agile. This “experimental mindset”
implies you (explicitly!) define a hypothesis, design your
experiment-on-the-job, measure, and afterwards adjust your approach in
accordance with outcomes. Then rinse and repeat.
Within Scrum,
this empirical cycle is represented by planning-build-product demo-retrospective.
There is an “inside” feedback loop where the amount of work committed gets
compared against the deliverables at the product demo. And there is also an
“outside” loop, which serves as a meta-learning process.
During retrospectives
(the “outside” loop), the team discusses how to adjust their way of working.
Empirical (objective) data, as well as subjective input, are brought to the
table. Subjective data stems form experiencing how collaboration impacts
productivity and the general “workplace experience.” Based on this shared
reflection, the team can choose to try improvements, and evaluate during the
next retrospective how those worked. Every Sprint cycle really is a new experiment.
Teams that choose to adopt
Agile (or Lean, for that matter) can leverage a wide body of knowledge with
regards to what works, and why. Known success factors in Agile are things like
choosing the shortest possible cycles, minimizing your WIP, testing early and
often, and empowering the whole team to jointly face as large a part of the
value chain as possible.
Practices that are known
to drive Agile success enable creativity and entrepreneurism. These practices
are an integral part of Lean and Agile alike. But a management shift is also a
vital piece of the puzzle (Appelo, 2011). There is no free lunch. It is easy to wish for hyper productivity
as a result of adopting Agile, but too many people ignore what it takes to
actually get there. Test, give it a try – find out!
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