Agile From First Principles

Lynda Girvan,Simon Girvan

• Publisher: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781780175812
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Computer Science

Agile principles and values transform the way organisations carry out business and respond to change. This book is an introductory guide to agile principles, values and mindset that will equip individuals and teams, regardless of role, to apply Agile from first principles. Practical examples are used throughout to illustrate agile theory with real-world context. This book is ideal for those wanting to achieve the BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile.

1 THE IMPORTANCE OF AGILE TODAY

It has never been more important for teams and leaders to understand Agile and how to apply it well

This chapter explains why Agile approaches are not only still important today but are more important than ever. We will explore why:

• Despite emerging over 20 years ago, the conditions that brought about the movement towards Agile development are still present and have intensified.
• Agile approaches are being applied in a growing range of areas and becoming commonplace, although they are also hard to do well and often applied poorly.
• Agile approaches, which began with software projects, are being applied to a wider range of business problems and are well matched to them.
• The secret to applying Agile well is to focus on acquiring a deep understanding of the underpinning fundamentals of Agile rather than just learning a framework.

WHY ARE WE HERE?

Before we start to consider the importance of Agile today, let’s look back at why Agile emerged.

In the late 1990s, development of new IT systems was characterised by large, expensive projects that seemingly took a long time to deliver. Teams would often attempt to understand the totality of the solution before any of the ideas had been tested. The result of this was lots of time spent ensuring a full set of requirements were documented up front before a line of code was written.

This approach is reasonable when there is little change and when you can be confident that your requirements are right. This may have been true for some of the systems and projects in the late 1990s, such as tax systems or banking systems that had a lifetime measured in years, but even then it was still a bit of a gamble. It is much less true now. Today, even a tax system requires regular changes to keep pace with the changing world that it supports.

In the mid-1990s huge organisations such as Lockheed, Chrysler, Xerox, Honda and Borland were trying things differently and getting better results. As we will explore in Chapter 2, those pioneers and innovators joined forces with others, also doing things differently, to create the paradigm shift of Agile development.

At the heart of this paradigm shift was the belief that reducing lead times, embracing changing requirements and improving customer buy-in was possible and would provide the ability for technology to create solutions faster than had been possible in the past. These core factors are not only still true today but have become orders of magnitude more significant.

We live in an increasingly VUCA world

The term VUCA emerged from the US War College in the wake of the collapse of the USSR and the end of the cold war. It was inspired by the leadership theories in the 1985 book Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge by Warren G. Bennis and Burt Nanus.¹ They recognised that what had been a relatively stable and predictable state was suddenly anything but that; things had become volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. This predicated an entirely different military approach.

What is meant by a VUCA world? It’s one that has the characteristics set out in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 VUCA

Volatility	The world is constantly changing. Change, both large and small, is more unpredictable and happening more frequently. This instability results in unforeseen, dramatic changes with cause and effect difficult or impossible to analyse at present.
Uncertainty	It is more difficult than ever to anticipate events. Attempts to use historical data to predict what will happen next fail as the past is no longer a good predictor of the future. This makes it extremely difficult to plan with any certainty.
Complexity	The world is more complex than ever. Problems are layered, nuanced, have more dimensions and are harder or impossible to truly comprehend. Information to support decisions is incomplete, contradictory and untrustworthy. There isn’t always a single right decision and, if there is, the answer is difficult to reach through analysis.
Ambiguity	There is rarely a single right answer or unique best practice; everything is shades of grey. Decisions, plans and advice exist in an environment of contradictory, missing and extraneous data. Operating like this requires courage when taking decisions, and a willingness to accept you may turn out to be wrong.

The COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 is the perfect example of a VUCA situation. The situation was complex and constantly changing; large amounts of data were available, but they were contradictory and incomplete. The political challenge of balancing economic impact, protecting society, preserving medical capacity and managing infection rates was an impossible task. Any solution that helped in one dimension caused harm in another. As more data emerged, previous decisions needed to be revised.

It is easy to find other examples of a VUCA world, particularly with knowledge work (i.e. work that is non-routine and requires divergent and convergent thinking to solve problems). We have learned to construct complicated physical solutions such as bridges and electronics dependably, yet even the most experienced and skilled teams struggle to deliver IT or business change projects without exception reports, changes to requirements and rework. This isn’t a failure of their management approach or poor quality implementations – this is because the problems being solved exhibit VUCA.

We find it hard to predict the future at the best of times. That’s why IT projects are so difficult. They generally depend on user requirements being an accurate prediction of what users will need – yet, people are very bad at accurately predicting this. The problem is exacerbated when the data that are informing the prediction keep changing. This is true of non-IT projects, such as business change or service delivery projects, too.

When a problem is a VUCA problem, you cannot follow the current plan or analyse your way to a solution using traditional methods. When problems happen – the requirements change or the solutions don’t work – it isn’t generally a failure in planning or implementation; instead, it is often an acknowledgement that the problem wasn’t capable of being analysed in advance. More or better analysis probably wouldn’t have resulted in a successful delivery – it would likely have resulted in different things going wrong.

When we are confronted with VUCA problems, we need to solve them in different ways, and that’s where Agile comes in.

Converging leadership approaches

The problems of a VUCA world are not restricted to areas where Agile is traditionally used, so it should be no surprise that the direction of travel of Agile leadership and more general management theories are converging. Leadership experts and gurus who have never even heard of the Agile Manifesto are coming to conclusions about how best to lead teams that are very similar to those of Agile thought leaders.

Joost Minnaar and Pim De Morree quit their corporate jobs and embarked on a mission to meet the people behind the world’s most inspiring organisations and understand what makes them think differently. They documented their findings on their website² and in their inspiring book, Corporate Rebels.³

The organisations that inspire them include clothing companies, bus manufacturers, public sector organisations and banks. Few would describe themselves as an ‘Agile organisation’, yet the practices, behaviours and cultures they have created resonate strongly with those described in the Agile Manifesto.

David Marquet’s book, Turn The Ship Around,⁴ describes how he transformed his leadership from one of command and control into what he calls ‘Intent Based Leadership’. Team members at all levels are empowered to take decisions; rather than waiting to be told what to do, they know what the overall vision is, decide what they need to do to move towards it and share what they intend to do with their colleagues and leaders. What’s even more remarkable is that Marquet did this in the most surprising of situations – as commander of a nuclear-powered submarine in the US Navy. Although not labelled as an ‘Agile’ transformation, many of the changes Marquet made are the same ones we would recommend to organisations trying to be more Agile.

Agile leadership isn’t just for small teams either. Jeff Sutherland, one of the creators of the most widely used Agile approach, Scrum, was part of the team that applied Agile approaches to the development of a military jet fighter – the JAS 39E Saab Gripen.⁵ As on David Marquet’s submarine, decisions were given to the team to make wherever possible. They operated to short three-week iterations with higher level coordination happening quarterly – orders of magnitude more frequent than most military procurements. They had a strong focus on continuous improvement and ensured frequent customer engagement by having pilots available on the same site to provide feedback.

In his book Implementing Beyond Budgeting and his work with the Beyond Budgeting Institute,⁶ Bjarte Bogsnes describes how it is possible to run huge traditional businesses in radically different ways. He explains that organisations don’t need to focus on short-term financial targets or plan around fixed dates (such as financial year boundaries). They don’t need to set targets and cascade them to teams or control their people with detailed rules and performance evaluation. Instead, they can have teams with high degrees of autonomy over their work that organise around business-centric rhythms and events. They draw down resources when they are needed and are aligned and driven by high-level strategic objectives. Organisations operating successfully like this include large banks, petrochemical companies and manufacturers.

When author Dan Pink researched 50 years of behavioural science and psychology to understand what motivates us, he discovered that it’s not what many people think. His book⁷ explains why trying to motivate teams with money or promotions not only doesn’t work, it can actually make us perform more poorly, especially for knowledge work. Instead, he found the key drivers of intrinsic motivation are autonomy, mastery and purpose.

These are just a few examples of advances in leadership and management theory that share many attributes with an Agile mindset. We will explore them in more detail in Chapter 9. Just as these approaches can support and enable Agile teams, so too can Agile approaches be valuable to leaders in any sector. As these examples show, you don’t have to be applying an Agile methodology to benefit from Agile...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• BCS, The Chartered Institute for It
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• About the authors
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Preface
• 1. The Importance of Agile Today
• 2 The Origins of Agile
• 3 Projects and Products in Agile
• 4 Understanding the Manifesto for Agile
• 5 Understanding the Agile Principles
• 6 Fundamental Concepts in Agile
• 7 Agile Delivery
• 8 Agile Practices
• 9 Agile Leadership
• 10 Managing the Product
• 11 Beyond the Basics
• Index
• Back Cover