In the year 2000 agile was fairly universally agreed to mean being “able to move quickly and easily”. Then in February 2001 a group of 17 software developers got together and penned the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. On the surface of it the four values and twelve principles contained in the manifesto make good sense. What’s more a number of organisations reported great success when they applied these values and principles to their particular issues and opportunities.
Agile began to grow in popularity, not only for software development but across IT whether it is relevant or not. (I’ve lost count of the number of software providers who’s marketing material says they use agile to implement their solution but when you scratch the surface its just a tiny bit…) Agile hasn’t just conquered IT however, whole organisations are moving to agile.
But what are we all implementing? It is almost never the 4 values and 12 principles of the manifesto, it is almost always some version of an agile methodology that “underpins our new ways of working.”
This disturbs me.
Somehow in the last 20 years in the name of AGILE organisation #s have gone from seeking to be able to “move quickly and easily” to implementing a set of work rules that have to be followed. Perhaps worse, we have gone from seeking to be agile guided by a set of principles and values to doing agile as prescribed by a methodology and it’s hard not to conclude that we missed the point in the process.