Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

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I've had the pleasure of introducing Agile and its RAD/JAD predecessors into a number of projects over the last 20 years. Today, the questions I hear from clients in the early stages of adoption are much the same as they always have been, but they are framed differently. I think this reflects that Agile has entered the mainstream of business thinking, and the questions are now coloured by expectations set as a result of reading books, seeing presentations and meeting practitioners.

So this seems like a good time to revisit some of these FAQs, and give today's answer to these old chestnuts. Starting at the very beginning, with the basic question of 'What is Agile', and it's cousin 'How Agile am I'?

My favourite answer was, I think, originally offered by Linda Rising. If you are working to deliver tested user stories, in regular time-boxed increments, and reviewing your performance at each increment in a search for improvements - then you are Agile.

In working with user stories you have made the shift from performing technical tasks to focusing on value and delivering working, tested software. Now you can move away from management practices designed to support mass production, and instead work to optimise the rate at which you can deliver the discrete and variable pieces of work described by user stories.

Delivering at regular intervals lets us measure our delivery rate (velocity) and therefore also our capacity for work in a period of time. It's impossible to overstate the importance of knowing these two numbers; once you have them everybody can - and should - get involved in the great game of making them higher. We make as many people as possible aware of them, debate their accuracy, discuss what factors impact on them, and generally argue what it might take to be better - where better is a higher number.

This debate happens all the time, and most importantly after each delivery, while memory is fresh. At this point, all the many advices of Agile and Lean thinking can be prompts for topics to think about and examine for value in our environment.

I appreciate that this definition leaves out far more than it covers, but it has the essential benefit that adopters can stop worrying about Agile adoption for it’s own sake, and instead focus on improvement, with a simple encompassing metric to show progress. 'How Agile am I?' is not the point, the point is I know my velocity, and I'm finding ways to make it higher.