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<title>Agile rocked by turbulent times in tech : a series</title>
<link>https://agilemanifest.com/2024/07/29/agile-and-turbulent-times-in-tech/</link>
<comments>https://agilemanifest.com/2024/07/29/agile-and-turbulent-times-in-tech/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[admin]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 29 Jul 2024 23:49:31 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[agile]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[ai]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[scrum]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://agilemanifest.com/?p=231</guid>
<description><![CDATA[<p>At the time of this writing, there’s a flood of anti-agile posts on X and LinkedIn and continuous pressure on the supportive roles and structures for agile implementations, transformations, trainings — the whole “agile economy,” continuing the trend of the last few years. The view from agilemanifest.com is that “agility” is needed more than ever, ... <a title="Agile rocked by turbulent times in tech : a series" class="read-more" href="https://agilemanifest.com/2024/07/29/agile-and-turbulent-times-in-tech/" aria-label="Read more about Agile rocked by turbulent times in tech : a series">Read more</a></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://agilemanifest.com/2024/07/29/agile-and-turbulent-times-in-tech/">Agile rocked by turbulent times in tech : a series</a> first appeared on <a href="https://agilemanifest.com">Agile Manifest</a>.</p>]]></description>
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<p>At the time of this writing, there’s a flood of anti-agile posts on X and LinkedIn and continuous pressure on the supportive roles and structures for agile implementations, transformations, trainings — the whole “agile economy,” continuing the trend of the last few years. The view from agilemanifest.com is that “agility” is needed more than ever, though the way it “manifests” will evolve and morph and reconstitute in a mix of predicable and unpredictable ways. Will the whole of the agile movement, if we want to call it that, be jettisoned in favor of new words, new roles, new ways of working? </p>
<p>Let’s talk about a few root causes. The first is just the natural lifecycle of business practices – when a business practice is approaching the age of the youngest members of the workforce, a meaningful segment of that workforce is likely to view those practices as dated and vintage whether or not they’re effective. In fact, whether or not they’re even being followed. The “agile in name only” phenomenon, is another root cause, which amplifies the first one. Many people in tech who are mid or late career now have had the misfortune of being in organizations with “agile” being thrown around like “empowerment” and “synergy” and <insert buzzword here>. If they haven’t seen “good” agile, they may have concluded a long time ago that there really isn’t “good” agile. Not a big step from there to conclude that agile itself isn’t “good.” So, you’ve got a meaningful cohort of instinctive and experienced skeptics and detractors. That’s the same as it ever was for agile, in truth. But there are other developments.</p>
<p>COVID drove remote work, not that it wasn’t present before. But, en masse, remote work didn’t just make the iconic, best case scenario small teams of vibrant team mates having physical standups an even rarer phenomenon, it shifted the meaning of these gatherings. The insistence on face to face communication fell under the “return to the office” camp, which even as this is written is more closely associated with command and control executives, who, whether they’re right or wrong, often are not leading the charge for other agile practices like decentralization and servant-leadership. Which is to say, the primacy of the customer, and the team’s ability to responding to the customer…is that hurt or helped with being physically in the office, to attend stand ups? If that makes you scratch your head or want to draw a diagram, that’s one of the second order effects — in the context of a hierarchical physical bureaucracy with different floors and buildings segregating functions, getting everyone out of those literal spaces to a literal common space was actually a recipe that “agile” inherited. A small team working together in the same laboratory, or factory, or warehouse, or garage, or cave – that’s how stuff got done with a minimum of latency and fluff. Remote tooling and culture creates virtual spaces – it doesn’t matter if they’re inferior if they seem like viable substitutes. If someone’s emoticon in a Slack message *seems* the same or close enough to being in the room with them, and someone whose title seems to imply they’re a “process master” is telling you that you need an hour commute on both sides of a visit to a common office space filled with cubicles or just tables so you can tell everybody aloud what you could put in Slack, or Teams, or any number of ticketing systems…</p>
<p>Much more can (and will) be said about this, but hopefully the point is made that the last few years, the experience of rote agile practices are massively challenged by macroscopic shifts in ways of working and interacting and the relative desirability of traditional office space in general? </p>
<p>This is going to be a series, but even as we dive more into the nuances of root causes and their lingering effect, rest assured we’ll get to bright spots. We’ll discuss ways that those of you who have experienced, led, trained, advocated for, struggled to enable agility against previous impediments and obstacles will have opportunities to help reshape the way we work together and create value. There’s no sales pitch or easy answers at the end of this series, but it won’t just be recycled gloom and doom, either. Share some of your thoughts in the comments. </p><p>The post <a href="https://agilemanifest.com/2024/07/29/agile-and-turbulent-times-in-tech/">Agile rocked by turbulent times in tech : a series</a> first appeared on <a href="https://agilemanifest.com">Agile Manifest</a>.</p>]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Agile in a downturn: Big Visible Value or die.</title>
<link>https://agilemanifest.com/2023/02/22/agile-in-a-downturn/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[admin]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 22 Feb 2023 19:21:20 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[agile]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[agile manifesto]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[ai]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[chatgpt]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[SAFe]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Scrum]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[agile training]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[generative ai]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[scrum]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://agilemanifest.com/?p=188</guid>
<description><![CDATA[<p>Big Visible Value highlights how the investment in time and money for "agility" affects strategic outcomes.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://agilemanifest.com/2023/02/22/agile-in-a-downturn/">Agile in a downturn: Big Visible Value or die.</a> first appeared on <a href="https://agilemanifest.com">Agile Manifest</a>.</p>]]></description>
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<p>What’s it like trying to implement, hone or expand agile practices in difficult economic times? Many seasoned agile coaches and practitioners will have horror stories and tales of unexpected triumph from previous rough spells, going back to Y2K times, when hominids roamed the plains and savannahs (and towns and cities) without smart phones and broadband and AI of any kind.</p>
<p>Next on the historic list would probably be the Global Financial Crisis that carried through to 2010 or so, followed by blips and hiccups until COVID times, which either wrecked or boomed whole industries.</p>
<p>Today’s downturn, in early 2023, is different in a few key ways.</p>
<ol style="font-size:1em" class="<li style="margin-bottom: 10px;"> wp-block-list">
<li>Agile is not new, and is seen in some circles as old or of uncertain usefulness</li>
<li>Agile in the form of Scrum and SAFe may have semi-expensive to very expensive certifications at their core. Costs with uncertain benefit, and quality training in general gets hit hard in rough times.</li>
<li>There is a profusion (one might say <em>glut</em> ) of asynchronous learning opportunities that allow an eternal sampling of agile-related content. This is fantastic for the self-motivated learner, and may yield some wonderful breakthrough moments on teams that figure things out on their own (we’ll have more on that later). The downside is that bottom-up implementations often stall, and training that takes people away from their day to day work will be hard to differentiate from ad hoc tips and anecdotes.</li>
<li>New technologies like ChatGPT, of course, which didn’t participate at all in this post, by the way, but also an ever-widening array of tools and platforms and promises are drowning senior leaders and engineers in choices and decisions and potential paths forward. Until the pay off starts “agile,” including the manifesto, doesn’t directly help with that. </li>
<li>In all candor, the age of the truly cross-functional team as a primary organizing principle is probably coming to a close, or at least becoming a niche and guide post to help simplify organizational structures. </li>
<li>Team-based best efforts architecture that accounts for UI/UX, security, performance, cloud architecture & spend, personalization, analytics, data strategy, opportunities for AI and automation as a standard way of working, a goal, rather than an option or template to start from is increasingly unrealistic and potentially dangerous. </li>
<li>The problem that agile solves can become blurry. This entire site is about the manifestation of Agile in the real-world, so there is little doubt here that the problems that agile helps solve are, to some extent, evergreen. But in the olden days, with eighteen month long development cycles and clean lines between design, development, test, and release, the pickings were easy. That way of working was broken and inane. But partially because of the proliferation of agile terms and half-measures, the foundational problems of connection to customers, collaboration on the teams, and sloppy handoffs can be more obscured. Unpacking complicated problems can be an activity with fewer enthusiastic sponsors in lean times.</li>
</ol>
<p>This is just a partial list of the challenges of implementing agile in a downturn. There will be more to come, but along with that solutions or thoughts to consider, as well as toolkits and references. </p>
<p>As a parting thought for this post, consider this: who are the sponsors (or the potential sponsors) of your agile initiatives? Is your communication with them primarily around the rote practices or the outcomes and impacts to the organization, to the business, to the engagement of the teams? How healthy is the core business or organization doing the sponsoring? </p>
<p>Approaches to kicking off or evolving agile practices must be as relevant and as connected to the momentum trends of the organization as possible. If you’re leading or coaching transformation, it’s strongly recommended that you don’t wait to be told whether it is. Go see. </p>
<p>Agile transformations that have inadvertently fallen into the tempo and value delivery cadence of Old School Waterfall software development, potentially mirroring their host organizations, can model the kind of focus on cumulative short-term outcomes for which they are presumably advocating. </p>
<p><strong>Big Visible Charts</strong> show <strong>activity</strong>. They promote transparency of work in progress and help reinforce the idea of limiting and focusing that work. How visible is that visibility? How valuable is that visibility? Is it helping keep projects on track and aligning team members, but perhaps not bridging a communication gap back to product managers if the organization is siloed? <strong>Big Visible Value</strong> happens when that chart, or some version of it, is part of an overall communication strategy that highlights the bottom line (or top line) value of accelerating or de-risking strategic initiatives. </p><p>The post <a href="https://agilemanifest.com/2023/02/22/agile-in-a-downturn/">Agile in a downturn: Big Visible Value or die.</a> first appeared on <a href="https://agilemanifest.com">Agile Manifest</a>.</p>]]></content:encoded>
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<title>4 values, 12 principles – how do they hold up?</title>
<link>https://agilemanifest.com/2020/03/01/4-values-12-principles-how-do-they-hold-up/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[admin]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 01 Mar 2020 20:54:21 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[agile]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[agile manifesto]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://agilemanifest.com/?p=169</guid>
<description><![CDATA[<p>Twenty years on, the Agile Manifesto is controversial and provokes heated debate in some circles, shrugs in others. For some, it is an inspirational guiding document and revelation. For others, it’s out of date, or at least showing signs of wear. AgileManifest.Com is not affiliated with the Agile Manifesto, though all contributors have had considerable ... <a title="4 values, 12 principles – how do they hold up?" class="read-more" href="https://agilemanifest.com/2020/03/01/4-values-12-principles-how-do-they-hold-up/" aria-label="Read more about 4 values, 12 principles – how do they hold up?">Read more</a></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://agilemanifest.com/2020/03/01/4-values-12-principles-how-do-they-hold-up/">4 values, 12 principles – how do they hold up?</a> first appeared on <a href="https://agilemanifest.com">Agile Manifest</a>.</p>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Twenty years on, the Agile Manifesto is controversial and provokes heated debate in some circles, shrugs in others. For some, it is an inspirational guiding document and revelation. For others, it’s out of date, or at least showing signs of wear. </p>
<p>AgileManifest.Com is not affiliated with the Agile Manifesto, though all contributors have had considerable experience exploring, testing and adapting every aspect of the original Manifesto in the field. Over and over and over again.</p>
<p>“Agile in the Real World” means acknowledging that the real world as you read this is different than last month, last year, last decade, and certainly two decades ago when the Manifesto came into being.</p>
<p>A fundamental truth of any mental model or organizing principle, even at the level of physics, is that context is paramount. There is context in time, place, culture, lifecycle – to what extent are the Agile Manifesto’s values and principles durable and adaptable? What additional information or color might help maintain or enhance its relevance or value today? Or, are there parts of the Manifesto that are awkward, impractical or unhelpful to the extent they should be cut or deprecated? </p>
<p>We’ll sponsor discussions about each, with a mix of open forum and curated discussions. As a working agreement with our visitors and contributors, we will 1) not just tee up a battle, we will have a point of view based on field experience and a widening array of expert practitioners and 2) we won’t present anything as one-size-fits-all or settled dogma. There are few hard and fast rules these days in organizational performance or “agile” practices, but avoiding endless loops or claims of absolute truth are a good working agreements. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/16.0.1/72x72/1f642.png" alt="🙂" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></p>
<p></p><p>The post <a href="https://agilemanifest.com/2020/03/01/4-values-12-principles-how-do-they-hold-up/">4 values, 12 principles – how do they hold up?</a> first appeared on <a href="https://agilemanifest.com">Agile Manifest</a>.</p>]]></content:encoded>
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<title>SAFe 5.0 is out – is it a game changer?</title>
<link>https://agilemanifest.com/2020/02/18/safe-5-0-is-out-is-it-a-game-changer/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[admin]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 18 Feb 2020 04:29:27 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[SAFe]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://agilemanifest.com/?p=50</guid>
<description><![CDATA[<p>The Scaled Agile Framework has about 30% market share of “named” frameworks, according to the 2019 VersionOne survey on the State of Agile. Given the marketing push around the update to 5.0 in January, it’s a fair guess that the SAFe will hold or gain share as the go-to framework when large organizations want to ... <a title="SAFe 5.0 is out – is it a game changer?" class="read-more" href="https://agilemanifest.com/2020/02/18/safe-5-0-is-out-is-it-a-game-changer/" aria-label="Read more about SAFe 5.0 is out – is it a game changer?">Read more</a></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://agilemanifest.com/2020/02/18/safe-5-0-is-out-is-it-a-game-changer/">SAFe 5.0 is out – is it a game changer?</a> first appeared on <a href="https://agilemanifest.com">Agile Manifest</a>.</p>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The Scaled Agile Framework has about 30% market share of “named” frameworks, according to the 2019 VersionOne survey on the <a href="https://www.stateofagile.com/#ufh-c-473508-state-of-agile-report">State of Agile</a>. Given the marketing push around the update to 5.0 in January, it’s a fair guess that the SAFe will hold or gain share as the go-to framework when large organizations want to “go agile” beyond the team level. </p>
<p>Among “agilists,” SAFe is controversial for a variety of reasons, and is beyond the scope of this post – but with 5.0, SAFe may be pursuing a kind of “blue ocean strategy” to create distance from software-focused agile practices that extend out from team level agility, shifting the focus to organizational and business agility. SAFe already “wraps” Scrum and Kanban, in the sense that it doesn’t compete with these but leverages them for its program rhythms. Its emphasis on system thinking and addressing the upstream and downstream issues affecting agile teams may warrant consideration of the framework as a set of agile enablement practices which can be selectively applied, independent of the overall adoption brand affiliation. </p><p>The post <a href="https://agilemanifest.com/2020/02/18/safe-5-0-is-out-is-it-a-game-changer/">SAFe 5.0 is out – is it a game changer?</a> first appeared on <a href="https://agilemanifest.com">Agile Manifest</a>.</p>]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Official Scrum Guide Updated!</title>
<link>https://agilemanifest.com/2017/11/26/scrum-guide-updated/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[admin]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 26 Nov 2017 03:21:28 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Scrum]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[jeff sutherland]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[ken schwaber]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[scrum]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://agilemanifest.com/?p=36</guid>
<description><![CDATA[<p>November 2017, the official Scrum Guide was updated. http://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html   See the “Parents of Scrum” Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber discuss the updates, with lots of interesting background and color commentary. https://www.scrum.org/resources/2017-scrum-guide-update-ken-schwaber-and-jeff-sutherland   The short guide itself and this video (runs just short of an hour) is fine primary source material.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://agilemanifest.com/2017/11/26/scrum-guide-updated/">Official Scrum Guide Updated!</a> first appeared on <a href="https://agilemanifest.com">Agile Manifest</a>.</p>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>November 2017, the official Scrum Guide was updated.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html">http://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>See the “Parents of Scrum” Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber discuss the updates, with lots of interesting background and color commentary.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.scrum.org/resources/2017-scrum-guide-update-ken-schwaber-and-jeff-sutherland">https://www.scrum.org/resources/2017-scrum-guide-update-ken-schwaber-and-jeff-sutherland</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>The short guide itself and this video (runs just short of an hour) is fine primary source material.</p><p>The post <a href="https://agilemanifest.com/2017/11/26/scrum-guide-updated/">Official Scrum Guide Updated!</a> first appeared on <a href="https://agilemanifest.com">Agile Manifest</a>.</p>]]></content:encoded>
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<title>What is Agile Manifest?</title>
<link>https://agilemanifest.com/2017/04/30/hello-world/</link>
<comments>https://agilemanifest.com/2017/04/30/hello-world/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[admin]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 30 Apr 2017 02:25:53 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://agilemanifest.com/?p=1</guid>
<description><![CDATA[<p>Agile made Manifest: examples of and toolkits for Agile working in the real world. A curated manifest of valuable Agile Practices, Techniques and Tools.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://agilemanifest.com/2017/04/30/hello-world/">What is Agile Manifest?</a> first appeared on <a href="https://agilemanifest.com">Agile Manifest</a>.</p>]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<ol>
<li>Agile made Manifest: examples of and toolkits for Agile working in the real world.</li>
<li>A curated manifest of valuable Agile Practices, Techniques and Tools.</li>
</ol><p>The post <a href="https://agilemanifest.com/2017/04/30/hello-world/">What is Agile Manifest?</a> first appeared on <a href="https://agilemanifest.com">Agile Manifest</a>.</p>]]></content:encoded>
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