Wow, lots of agile stuff

A couple of weeks after my last post about Software Faster, there seems to be lots of these posts popping up in my reader about agile. We may have reached this critical point in the agile movement were we are starting to realize that in the name of being agile we are being rigid. Here are the recent posts that jumped out at me.

Agile Results

This post my J.D. Meier about “Task Management for Teams” is very interesting and I didn’t realize that “Agile Results” existed until this post. Funny thing about this method it is very similiar to what our team decided that we are going to report on. Ours are very business oriented and focused, but in general this is what we have been doing for well over nine months and the business is super happy and so is upper management as listing your “goals” aka Wins for each time box makes it clear what we are trying to do and if we got it done. I have purchased the book and will do a full review shortly, but it looks like it is going to provide some additional techniques to tweak what we are already doing.

The Failure of Agile

Another post about The Failure of Agile was posted last week by Andy Hunt about how he thinks agile has lost its way. I couldn’t agree more, we focus a lot on a specific technique and rules, which are great for getting started, but at some point the training wheels need to be removed and team members need to adapt their methods to focus on how they and their customers do business. He introduces a new method called GROWS which is really what succesful teams have been doing from the start. I think one of the most important statements in the entire post is when he starts talking about how junior members need the rules. It is true, but if the more senior members of the team are not nurturing the other team members to grow into being truly agile then of course that is when it fails.

I am lucky that I am part of a team where we are always growing and learning. We have trust and communication which allows us to truly perform and be adaptive and responsive to the business we support. Our cusotmers are our focus and we try our best to deliver the technical solutions as we need them. Hopefully everything from the above two blog posts can be incorporated into our approaches to aiding our customers.

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