What is Agile? What Does Agile Mean?

calendar May 5, 2022 · 8 min read · Agile Agility Scrum  ·
Share on: linkedin copy

You may have heard people talking about agile, especially if you have collaborated with people in the software industry, ”we need to be agile”, or, ”we are working towards business agility”. Since the Agile Manifesto, introduced back in 2001 (“What Is Agile Software Development?” 2015) there has been an interest in lightweight approaches in software intensive business development that shifts the primary focus towards outcomes of rather than the actual development tools and processes. Books like the Lean Startup(Ries 2011) and, Zero to one (Thiel and Masters 2014) have further sparked interest in agile and lean ideas. But what is agile, and what benefits do we associate with being more agile? The Agile Alliance defines agile as:

“the ability to create and respond to change. It is a way of dealing with, and ultimately succeeding in, an uncertain and turbulent environment.” (“What Is Agile Software Development?” 2015)

Why Agile?

By being responsive and adopting and adjusting to the environment, we will create more accurate solutions. Ideally, these are more desirable and provide better value. By being agile, an organization reaches a certain level of agility. These definitions are challenging since it implies abilities that many already have in their organization. Who can claim their organization doesn’t respond to change, or can handle turbulence and uncertainty? Most can but agile approaches will offer ways to deal with these issues in a structured ways and offer a narrative to discuss progress and challenges.

Agile isn’t a method or a framework, it’s presented as the ability to act and hence view, create, and perceive change. In order to become agile, tools and frameworks used should all contribute to a culture that aligns with being agile. I often call it an approach.

The Agile Manifesto The agile manifesto (Beck et al. 2001) was the founding initiative for the agile movement. It was the first attempt to condense and express these ideas among proponents of views and approaches, endorsing less focus on process and formalizes and more on people and value. The manifesto comprises four condensed prioritizations that the agile movement revolves around:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan

The Agile Manifesto, copyright 2001 by the authors (Beck et al. 2001) also comprises twelve principles outlining and further enhancing the meaning of the aforementioned prioritizations. Being agile in the 2020s still means to adhere to the prioritization and the principles. After twenty years, the manifesto still provides good guidance on how to reason about software intensive business development. The world has changed since they wrote the manifesto and today we face new challenges and insights. It is slightly paradoxical that the agile manifesto hasn’t developed, and responded to change. However, most of the items highlighted may be of equal importance today, but we have to adopt and cope with new challenges and insights accrued both practically and from research communities. We need to create an environment where we quickly can adapt and respond to change based on our understanding of the world and needs among customers, users, and stakeholders. The mechanisms, tools, practices associated with an agile approach also provide for a way of working in groups towards common goals through self-organization.

What are the Benefits of Being Agile?

Agile practices should lead to improved agility in an organization. Besides the direct effects related to adaptability, some benefits organizations adopting agile practices claim to achieve are:

  • Delivery of more valuable software where the value materializes quicker than before. The practices strive to put focus on continuous delivery rather than the actual contraction process. We should not see the focus on the latter as an ignorance of the former.
  • Teamwork and self-organization among employees opens up for innovative approaches to problem solving. Often, anti-fragile teams form where learning and broadening of knowledge is an integrated part of the work practice.
  • Better working environment for employees. The agile approaches often encourage delegation of control and responsibilities to teams, making employees feel more empowered in their everyday work.
  • Teams are more committed. If the teams commit to work and decide together a workable scope for upcoming work means they are highly committed to agreed deadlines.

The benefits above are can be observed in organizations, but focus must be on adaptability and possibilities to create change. It is important to follow up and understand if the agile approach contributes to this target and does so by creating value for your organization.

Agile pose
Beeing agile results in higher flexibility.

Are there any Drawbacks to Adopting Agility?

Just like most things, the agile approach and mindset will have its own share of challenges. This includes:

  • A sense of lost control from the perspective of the current organization. Delegation and ideas about autonomous teams can be perceived as counter-productive. The lack of control may pose challenges for leaders who are expected to have a finer control for how teams accomplish value and improvement-work than is initially offered by agile practices.
  • Focus on change and a continuous focus on customer alignment take away focus from efficiency in, e.g., the manufacturing process steps. This is a feature rather than a drawback from an agile perspective, since the re-alignment of focus may pose other views on how to reach the desired product and outcomes. From a traditional bench-marking perspective, however, this may seem contra-intuitive.
  • Incremental value and continuous improvement won’t show the same large numbers posed by other approaches. A large project on automation may have a larger directly measurable economic benefit than an agile approach, but is a onetime initiative not considering the continuous improvement culture agile approaches advocates. This is a challenge partly connected to how we understand and reason about success in our organizations, where agile approaches advocates of continuous improvement based on learning and insights.

Is agile a set of tools?

Sprint, Kanban, Story points and demos are concepts often used when people to describe agile. If you aren’t familiar with these terms, we will cover them in future posts (you may recognize one or more of them), but these tools, ceremonies, processes etc. are branded as agile. The usage of these artifacts put you on an agile trajectory, but just like a drilling machine is used to drill holes, it won’t make you a skilled carpenter overnight. It supports your needs and intentions of drilling holes, but the drilling must take place in a context that achieves the desired goals of your activity. To implement an agile approach by deploying a set of tools won’t get you where you want to take your organization from an agile standpoint. That said, ideas from agile-branded methods and tools will give you something beneficial. They are pieces in the agile jigsaw puzzle. We need to embrace an agile mindset and align the organizational culture with agile ideas and principles. By doing so, the image of the jigsaw will be clearer and the use and purpose of tools and practices will be easier to understand and elaborate further on.

Getting Started With Agile

Starting your organization’s agile journey is easy. Often, the exploration starts through grass-root initiatives within an organization. Teams may use Kanban flows or Scrum inspired boards to visualize work and progress. By using concepts such as daily standups, iterations and work in process-limit (WIP-limit) teams can plan, communicate and reason about what progress and challenges they are experiencing continuously and adapt. Trying out agile tools gives a starting point for reflections about benefits of an agile approach. To get started with the tools and practices, the Scrum approach may provide insights. ScrumGuides.org (Schwaber and Sutherland 2020) provides a good introductory guide we recommend. With that said, the journey towards a level of business agility requires a larger body of effort and work.

Is Agile Just for IT?

Lean is a major source for the agile movement and the notion Business Agility is frequently used to ascribe agile qualities in a broader context. So the answer is no. In most situations, IT is an important enabler for business agility. The digitalization is the integration and unification of business and IT where the two become indistinguishable. Many ideas stem from the IT domain, but the inspiration for one approach often used, Scrum stems from ideas in a paper in the Harvard Business Review (Takeuchi and Nonaka 1986), discussing product development. IT-work isn’t carried out in isolation in most organizations since it is often an integral part of doing and creating new opportunities for improvements in practices in the everyday operations of that business. But the most important question is agile something for you and your organization? The answer is up to you to decide for, but probably a resounding yes. Start the journey towards increasing agility and explore the potential benefits and challenges in your organization!

List of References

  • Agile Alliance. “What Is Agile Software Development?,” June 29, 2015. https://www.agilealliance.org/agile101/.

  • Beck, Kent, Mike Beedle, Arie Bennekum, van, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler, James Grenning, et al. “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” 2001. https://agilemanifesto.org/.

  • Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. 1st ed. New York: Crown Business, 2011.

  • Schwaber, Ken, and Jeff Sutherland. “Scrum Guide | Scrum Guides.” Scrum Guides, 2020. https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html.

  • Takeuchi, Hirotaka, and Ikujiro Nonaka. “The New New Product Development Game.” Harvard Business Review 64, no. 1 (1986): 11.

  • Thiel, Peter A., and Blake Masters. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. First edition. New York: Crown Business, 2014.