It is my great pleasure to discuss with you
now the frameworks trap, a.k.a., frankly, the way
that most companies approach agile and lean.
So as we've discussed, actually implementing
agile and lean practices.
Well is not that complicated.
If you understand your organizational challenges
and you understand the core values of agile and lean,
then it's just a matter of trying stuff out and saying,
are these values guiding us towards solving
our organizational challenges?
Are these practices working.
Are they not working?
And if they're not working, how do we change them?
Easy and simple, right?
But if you look up the agile landscape,
all the different frameworks, methodologies, consultancies,
companies trying to kind of give you their own special sauce,
take on agile.
According to Deloitte, the industry analyst firm,
it looks like this, which is exhausting.
This is terrifying.
This doesn't feel very agile.
And looking at this gives me a headache and massive anxiety.
This is what a lot of the discourse about agile looks
like.
It's people debating the finer points
of these very complicated competing systems when we
talk about the frameworks trap.
Welcome to it.
This is the trap.
This is the endless debate we can get into about the finer
points of methodologies where we totally
lose sight of the big picture.
And in fact, this has gotten so bad
that Andy hunt, who was one of the signers
of the agile manifesto, has declared agile a failure.
Think about that for a second.
This is one of those people who is associated with this hugely
successful movement and who is taking a step back and saying,
you all kind of missed the point on this.
This is worth reading in its entirety.
Andy hunt says, in the 14 years since the agile manifesto,
we've lost our way.
The word agile has become slow, organized, meaningless at best,
jingoistic at worst.
We have large swaths of people doing flaccid, agile,
a half hearted attempt at following a few select software
development practices.
Poorly, we have scads of vocal, agile zealots
as per the definition that a zealot
is one who redoubles their effort after they've
forgotten their aim.
Ouch and worst of all, agile methods
themselves have not been agile.
Now there's an irony for you.
So to summarize, we have one of the signers of the Agile
Manifesto saying that agile has become basically
this weird cult where people are yelling about the finer
points of practices.
But have completely forgotten their aim.
There's a truth here that applies to a lot of things,
but I think is particularly important when we talk about
agile and lean.
If you don't know why you're doing something,
it doesn't work.
Full stop.
If you are following a set of rules
because something told you to or someone told you to
and you don't know why you're following them.
It won't work.
It can't work because you haven't decided
what working will look like.
I worked with one organization where they said, are agile.
Coach told us a daily stand up meeting
should be 10 minutes long.
I said, OK, well, why?
They said, well, we don't really know.
But if we finish the meeting in 3 minutes,
we just kind of stand there for seven minutes
checking our watches and looking kind of awkwardly
at each other.
I mean, it has to be 10 minutes, right?
That is the least agile thing imaginable,
saying this has to be 10 minutes, we don't know why,
but somebody told us.
So I guess that's what we're going to do.
It's not good.
Again, it is not helping us leverage our Agilent
lean values to solve our organizational problems.
Can't really solve much of anything
if we're just doing it because somebody told us to.
Now, part of this means that we have
to really understand our organizational challenges,
right?
If we aren't taking the time to reflect
on what we're trying to solve for,
then no amount of agile practices and frameworks
can help us solve those problems.
So what I recommend doing is think about what
you're actually trying to solve for before you start looking
at agile practices, methodologies, looking at doing
lean experiments, you have to understand
what you're trying to fix.
So here are some questions that can
help you start to think through why and how you're
going to implement agile practices
and avoid the frameworks trap.
Ask yourself, what is the current challenge
your organization is facing?
Ask yourself, how do you think that your current approach is
contributing to this challenge?
Why is it that you haven't already fixed this?
Basically, what is the change you
intend to make to your approach?
How are you actually going to alter your approach?
What's the agile or lean practice, you're
going to experiment with?
And finally, and perhaps most importantly,
how will when this change is having the desired effect?
How will when this agile or lean practice
methodology or framework is actually meeting the needs?
How will when you've changed the thing you want to change?
If you can't answer that question,
you will never know when you have reached success.
If you keep refining your approach based
on what you're learning, you have given yourself
the greatest gift of all, because there
is no longer a wrong approach.
If you're continuously learning and adjusting.
Course, if you're doing this in a truly iterative way,
then there's very little downside here.
You can try something.
And if it doesn't work, you change it.
So long as you know what you're working towards
and you understand those goals.
This is actually not that hard.
If your 10 minute stand up meeting
is a waste of everybody's time, ask yourself,
why are we having these meetings in the first place?
What are we actually trying to solve?
What are we actually trying to accomplish.
And then change the practice?
But if you don't know what you're trying to solve,
changing the practice is just going to be flailing around
in the darkness.
Finally, the other great gift we give ourselves here
is that if we're constantly changing course
based on what we learn, we don't have
to sweat the right place to start that much.
We don't have to evaluate 87 different agile frameworks
with a sense of terror that if we pick the wrong one,
everything is going to fall apart.
If we pick the wrong one, we change it.
Once you give yourself the gift of escaping
the frameworks trap, continuously learning,
adjusting course based on a robust knowledge of what you're
trying to accomplish anywhere you
start is a great place to start.