What Agile really is

Our goal in agile is to satisfy our customers through the early and continuous delivery of valuable products and services. Not to cut costs by becoming more efficient. As we have been doing this work and helping others do it we have found that it’s more valuable to focus on people, collaboration, change and getting things working than it is to focus on processes, tools, contracts, plans and detailed documents.

We have found that the best way to develop valuable products for customers is through self-organising, cross-functional teams of business and technical people. Teams who can take an idea from the beginning to the end of the product development lifecycle quickly and often. Management’s job is to build teams of motivated and skilled people, give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

The team can choose how they work as long as they deliver valuable products to customers often. They can deliver every few weeks or months or they can deliver continuously. The sooner the better.

You don’t need to do SAFE or Scrum to do this. You could use a Kanban or DevOps approach instead or mix them up as you see fit. Add design thinking, BDD and automate everything. It’s up to you to find the best way to work and continually improve it. But whatever you do keep your process as simple, fast and customer-focused as possible and make sure you’re getting constant feedback from customers, users and the team on how you’re going and how you can improve.

Whatever you do — Don’t focus on following a detailed process developed by someone else, don’t spend a lot of time on tools, don’t develop detailed documents and plans upfront and don’t try and nail down partners commitments in detailed fixed-scope contracts. There is too much uncertainty, change and learning in what we do for any of that to work.