Welcome to agile for everybody, the essentials of agile
and lean, I'm very excited to talk to you about this today
because agile and lean are terms that
get thrown around a lot in modern organizations.
But there's still a lot of confusion and ambiguity
around what these things actually mean.
So to that end, we're going to start today
by debunking three common myths about agile and lean.
These are things you may have heard from people
in your organization.
These are things that you may have thought are what
agile and lean are all about.
And that's totally OK.
Each of these myths was something that at one point,
I thought agile and lean were all about.
So let's go through each of these myths,
talk about the myths themselves, and then
talk about the reality that corresponds to each
about agile and lean.
So no one, agile and lean are all about doing things faster.
I have been in meetings where senior leaders
have stood in front of product teams and said,
we're going to implement this agile thing
so that we can get way more software out there real fast.
And the product teams always start looking at each other
like, Oh no, is that what this is all about?
They just going to work us harder,
try to get more capacity out of us.
In reality, that's not what agile and lean
are about at all.
Agile and lean are about working better, not faster.
And in fact, as we'll see, agile and lean
often feel slower before they feel faster.
If you go into agile and lean thinking
that these are going to be magical ways
to accelerate your output, you're probably
going to be disappointed.
Our second myth agile and lean our rigid frameworks.
If you are a process averse person much as I am,
then you may be a little bit scared of agile and lean
because you've heard people talk about these almost
as if they're cults.
They're things that you have to follow to the letter.
And learn all these complicated, rigorous practices.
And if you deviate even the tiniest bit,
then everything is ruined.
That's not how agile and lean work
at all, agile and lean as we'll see our movements with values
that are activated through practices.
Now, if you want, you can combine and bundle
these practices into methodologies
or into frameworks, but you can get
a lot of value out of agile and lean without even
going that far.
It's really about why we're doing what we're doing,
not so much about doing things in a specific order
or a specific way.
And finally, our third myth about agile and lean, agile
and leaner only for software developers.
There are very specific reasons why you might think this.
As we'll see, agile and lean, both came out
of the software development community
and in many ways started by asking this question,
how can we build better software?
But in reality, the core values of agile and lean
are for everybody.
The ways of working better.
That agile, I mean, show us, can be
applied not just to people making software,
but to people making anything.
They can be used by marketing teams.
They can be used by sales teams.
Agile and lean are for everybody.
And before we move on, one quick bonus.
Mith, agile and lean are the same thing.
And a lot of cases, they're used interchangeably.
And if you do a Google search for our Agilent lean,
the same thing, a lot of results are going to come up.
But as we'll see, agile and lean are distinct,
but related movements.
They're related to each other, but they're not the same thing.
So let's dive a little deeper and look at what agile and lean
are, how they're related to each other.
And what we can do about it.