Agile and Post-Agile?

What is really agile? I've touched upon this topic earlier, but I have come across a few blogs on the topic again that are interesting. Especially David Anderson, Agile Management Blog where he asks the question "Are you part of the Post-Agile movement?". He also asks the question of what agile is and points further to Jason Yip and his Agility is not the point post. In this post Yip compare the so called Agile elements to those of Lean and he does a good job of it.

As Anderson says, we need to keep pushing.

To me it does not really matter if it is agile or not, as long as we can improve the way we perform our craft and deliver better solutions. Agile for me right now is to implement Scrum and see if this improves our abilities. When this process has settled I will keep pushing. Will you?

Rationale for the change

Change can happen in many ways and there is so many factors involved. As mentioned on my favorite leadership blog: Leadership in Practice, change fails when employees dont grasp the rationale for the change. By rationale meaning the why in the change. Why is it happening? Does the change only happen because some leader have found out that this should be better for the employees or its the latest hype? Head over there and read the post, it's a good one.

As i commented on George Amblers blog, it is more than just the rationale in change. It's the what and how as well. Many of these decisions should be taken by the employees afflicted by the change. They should know best how to perform changes. At least most of the time.

Maybe its naive to think that way, but to believe in people make them do incredible things.

Are the customer involved enough?

A while and several blog drafts since my last post now, but here it is.

The question is really, are the customer enabled to be involved enough? While we are quick to think if the customer are participating in creating the backlog or the sprintlog. By this having ownership in the decisions made. Not long ago on InfoQ Little and Spayd gave their views on agile and organisational change and they mention the importance of the customer being part of the agile process if the deliveries are to be successful. This is very true, but are they ready in their organisation to handle the deliveries?

As the Agile Manifesto principle states: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. This assume that the customer are able to handle these deliveries at the pace they are coming. Further the manifesto claim that Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. If we are to adhere to these principles we have to enable the customer to also become agile in their process of receiving the delivieries.

To take a practicle example of this I can relate to my current project which is in the process of implementing a more agile approach. Agreements have been met and deliveries have been delivered, but the receiving end are not able to handle the deliveries at such a pace. They lack both the manpower and the routines to test the deliveries thus bringing us back to how it was before. The team cannot keep on delivering while the tests are not being managed and we have to set a new pace. A good article on Agile Journal describe this scenario as candy coming faster on the conveyor belt, it creates trouble handling them.

This shows that agile processes sets new demands to the organisations not only where the deliveries are being produced, but also in the receiving organisation. Now you have not one, but two organisations that has to adopt agile. The question is are the customer involved enough to make that change?