When I told a former colleague that I had received my Professional Scrum Master certification, he laughed.
Agile is fake news, he said. It’s all theater. You work in teams, you create a backlog, you improve your KPIs: velocity, test coverage, code smells, code quality level, percent of code written in pair programming (not kidding, it’s something people measure), and so on. But when it comes crunch time, management just swoops in and tells you to get these features ready by delivery time and damn your plan. At the end, he said, it’s just Waterfall with new terminology.
I’ve heard these complaints many times before (and have made them myself), and I think that the question of ‘Agile theater’ is a real one that deserves its own post. But something else struck me about what my friend said: what he thought was the point of agile.
Pop quiz, hot shot: What’s the point of agile?
I’m serious. Take a moment, stop reading, and try to formulate the answer to this question.
Most people would probably answer something about flexibility, complexity, cross-functionality, self-organization, and so on. While these are all parts of agile development (and I use “development” here in the scrum sense of the word, of doing complex work), the point of agile strategies is much simpler: to deliver VALUE.
As agile practitioners, leaders, trainers, and organizations, our purpose is to deliver value. Everything else is a means to an end. Don’t take my word for it, either. Here’s a direct quote from the Evidence-Based Management Guide:
Agile is a means to an end, not the end itself; the whole point of adopting agile practices is to improve business performance. When organizations lose sight of this, managers ask questions that seem sensible, but might create unintended and undesirable consequences
My friend wasn’t really complaining about agile practices per se. Rather, he sensed instinctively that something was missing: They did all the rituals and ticked all the boxes, but at the end of the day they failed to provide value to the organization. Their management would sense this too, which is why they would swoop in and demand last-minute features. In essence, they demanded value be added to the product. Unfortunately, they too were too focused on the rituals and not on the purpose that they are there to promote.
Many organizations fall into the ritual trap. They “do Agile” (with a capital ‘a’). This phrase makes me cringe–and not just me. When “doing Agile” fails to bring value, they either do “more Agile” ( such as by switching from Scrum to Kanban because it’s “more flexible” or vise versa), or they abandon agility completely and go back to waterfall, often with the vocabulary of their selected agile process still in place. This is what happened in my friend’s organization. The determination to “do Agile” came in the expense of actual agility, and more importantly at the expense of bringing value. And the results were unhappy stakeholders, disaffected developers, and a mediocre product.