What is Agile & Why Should I Care?

As business agility coaches and consultants, we can sometimes forget how indoctrinated we are in this way of working. We spend countless hours studying and implementing various strategies and methodologies and gaining further certifications within the Lean-Agile framework. It takes years of experience to become an Agile coach. You have to endure years of failure and study, and immersing yourself in a culture that continuously encourages learning new things. As coaches, we’ve bought fully into what we preach, which has lots of advantages, but one disadvantage is that we forget what it is like to be one of the uninitiated.

Unfortunately, often we can sound like jargon monkeys (me included), and can hide behind vague terms like “Value” while spending too much time on terms such as “coach” vs. “consultant.” During my years in coaching and consulting however I find what presents the most confusion are the basics and trying to articulate to individuals who have been operating in the traditional management way why a shift may be necessary. I also see and hear about the tons of overworked and overwhelmed individuals that are tired of being burnout and stressed around their career or their booked schedule of responsibilities. The Agile mindset has helped me personally to breathe, take a step back, and re-evaluate my priorities consistently without guilt among many other things I would love to teach everyone how to do.

Therefore I'm going to be making a bit of a shift for my new Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook followers who are new to these concepts. My intention is to create a new space in my content for, “Why should I care about Agile and what is in it for me to learn if I can not take 3-day, $3000 classes?” 

Why should I care about Agile?:

Simply: Agile is a set of values and principles that get you and your teams focused on value-adding activities to iteratively improve your productivity. This saves you time, energy, money, and sanity. Agile is an anti-burnout, anti-jargon, anti-bs way to manage work for you and whole organizations.

What parts of that do you not want in your life?

Personally, I understand the challenge Agile can bring. Within my personal life and business, I try to embody an “Agile mindset”, which means I attempt to embody the values and principles of Agile in all my interactions. It is hard to be radically transparent all the time and not hide behind creating documentation instead of doing the hard work to realize a vision. It is hard to constantly embrace change and remain flexible in learning new ways of doing things. It is hard to consistently collaborate with individuals that have different opinions than you or different life experiences. It is hard to lead from the back of the room instead of the front.

But honestly, if I had not learned about these approaches and frameworks I would be horribly burnt out in some office struggling financially, emotionally, and physically to regain my sanity against corporate culture and traditional management.

If those feelings resonate with you then please read on as to how Agile can help lift you and your business out of those spaces. Agile is not a magic pill, but it makes blaringly obvious what you and your teams are doing wrong while giving back the space and time to fix it.

First, let’s understand what Agile is:

The cornerstone of Agile is the Agile Manifesto or the key set of values that underpin all Agile frameworks:

Behind those key values is a set of 12 principles that guide an Agile organization’s day-to-day:

The history of Agile is based in software development so some of these values and principles are phrased to fit that context, however, that does not mean they do not apply to everyday life or businesses outside of IT. The underlying goals are still the same.

Take the Agile value: “Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation”. For me, that means I can brainstorm a myriad of ideas for various blog articles. I can map out whole story arcs and series and give my editor all the work he could ask for, but without actually publishing I simply do not have a product to show for my efforts.

As another example, do you ever make a very comprehensive laundry list of to-do items to work through and then… go take a nap? Until you actually complete the work listed, you have not given yourself any value. Which is your cue to put “Take a nap” on the list. 

Now take the Agile Principle 02: “Welcoming changing requirements”. In your day-to-day life do you welcome changing requirements or dread them? If your kid needs to be picked up at a different place than usual or your dog starts to limp, do you panic? Scold your child or dog? Or put unnecessary stress on yourself because you now have a change to the demands of the day.

Agile encourages embracing these changes and helping you create a space to re-prioritize and harness change so that you can get the best out of your day. Maybe going to pick up your child in a different location means you get to go to that ice cream place you never go to anymore. Or your dog limping allows you to slow down and take a couple of days to take care of him and reconnect with your fur baby.

Which value or principle do you feel would be the hardest to implement in your life or your business and why?

Beyond Agile

Agile is really an umbrella for sets of values and principles that are then implemented through practices, tools, and frameworks. Doing so takes the concepts of Agile and turns them into actionable methods for which you can start to manage your work while simultaneously giving you guidance on how to live and manage by value instead of the tyranny of the urgent.

There are many tools, practices, and frameworks: Scrum, LeSS, SAFe, Behavior Driven Development, Application Lifecycle Management tools, Kanban, Flow Metrics, etc… the list goes on. One of the reasons I have a business is that I stay up to date on all of these practical methods and tools to best know what to implement in any Agile transforming organization. Us coaches have a toolbox of all the latest and greatest best practices to help you and your organization succeed with Agile.

For example, if your organization suffers from never learning from mistakes, this goes against Agile Principle 12: “The Team regularly reflects, tunes, and adjusts accordingly”. If you are in an organization implementing the Scrum framework I might suggest that Retrospectives, a practice of collaboratively identifying impediments and creating action items to fix them, may be a worthwhile addition to every team’s regular meeting cadence.

Over the next few weeks, I will be working on more articles to review and dig into different frameworks, practices, and tools that any organization can find helpful to their growth and stability. I want to remove the jargon-filled curtain and provide, real, tangible advice and guidance to those trying to get some time and sanity back into their lives. 

So…

What can I do today to start implementing Agile in a way to improve my life and my business?

As stated above, Agile is a HUGE spectrum and I will be creating articles around each of these concepts, but to start I thought I would take some of my favorite lessons from select frameworks that you can start to practice to save you time, energy, and money.

Kanban: Kanban is a flow-based, pull system that is used to visualize your work on a virtual or real-life board in order to prioritize, measure, and pull work through your productivity in real-time. 

Take a Lesson From Kanban:

Understand Your Work In Progress:

How many things are you juggling right now? What state are they in? Write them all down.
If the thought of that gives you anxiety…you are probably doing too much.

Lean: Lean is a no-frills framework straight out of car manufacturing focused on creating systems for highly efficient productivity gains by eliminating waste and understanding throughput.

Take a Lesson from Lean:

Eliminate Waste:

Declutter your life, your space, and your business. Start with your office, declutter and organize it by putting your most used and valuable items near you.

Finally, Take a Lesson from our most recently learned concept: Agile

Understand Your Value-Added Activities

What is going to truly bring me the most joy and fulfillment today or this week?

Even if that means taking a break or going for a walk or taking a mini-vacay.

Your value in your life is yours to own.

Congratulations, you are an Agile expert now, and with great power comes great responsibility!