I have been living the dream. No really, I have believed in the values and virtues of Agile for about a decade now so much so enabling digital products via Agile methods is also now my chosen full time occupation. Got attracted when the sequential models of delivery were leading to burn outs as a developer with no real benefit to end customer. Smaller cycles of delivery to get real customer feedback with no long drawn detailed right to left plans, monitoring flow of work to reduce delays, waste and measuring progress via real business value delivered, all made complete sense.

Having practiced, trained and now coached multiple teams, all of this still seems right. But the journey is not getting any easier and continues to be long & extremely painful. It usually starts as a lone warrior cutting through a lot of noise, pre-conceived notions, deep hierarchies and also corporate politics. Soon after it starts, people immediately rush to sell trainings, sell certifications, sell tools, take positions, some times fight to take ownerships and are eager to put some random numbers on the progress reports. 60% people Agile trained & certified, ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) tool adopted across 80% of projects, whiteboards and stand-ups for 100% of projects etc. etc. These are the times when I wonder where are the real outcomes? Are we selling a lot of snake oil in the name of Agile and chasing that elusive value and quality dream, or, is it really the model of the future which people would embrace to solve complex problems?

That was pretty much of my outburst this weekend morning and I could’ve closed here. Being a hard core optimist who continues to believe that agile methods driven by agile mindset is really the only way to deliver value faster to end customers and one who continues to rally behind the initiative would rather close with my 2c of suggestions from my recent experiences.

If you are the big boss, sponsoring such initiative in your organisation, please see & focus beyond trainings, tools, certifications and give the execution in the hands of people who understand & appreciate principles behind Agile. I do not have any issues with L&D departments and frankly are quite often the people who help me get an entry and also sometimes are the ones who also sign my checks. But when looking to run a real transformation initiative impacting business, technology, IT teams and overall delivery I would look for people who have had a strong experience in delivering products to end customers. Who have lived through the pain and hence have an appreciation of what will deliver the real outcome. Of course education is a big part of it and you will need a person who understand the nuances of delivering the right training to right set of participants, but may not be the only person running such initiatives.

If you are an executioner running a product development team and / or supporting an Agile transformation initiative in your organisation, choose a team of people as advocates who have their cup half empty. This one is usually the biggest stumbling block. “We know this”, “We have done this in the past”, “There is no value in trying that”, “That method is not meant for our organisation”, “We are too complex for that” and my all time favourite “We are already doing agile, we do morning stand-ups and use Jira”, are the usual phrases to watch out for. People who are flexible and looking to experiment with things they don’t (yet) completely believe in are the progressive mindset people we are looking to scale this.

If you are the product development team member suffering from yet another transformation initiative, hearing complex jargons thrown around and seeing external consultants floating on alien soil and wondering what these guys really get paid for – cautiously accept that insanity for some time. But only for some time, usually this should get you to a better spot via better ways of working with little overhead on your development routine fairly quickly. That’s what Agile methods were and are supposed to do, if this is not what you are experiencing and you are seeing complex processes, many and longer meetings, interrupted flow, to real value delivering feature development, raise your voice, question it, suggest changes just don’t accept it as something which is a “management initiative” and needs to be lived through.

Lastly, if you are the person facilitating product development – HR, Infrastructure, PMO governance office or Finance, please try and focus on team versus individuals, empowering versus constraining, enabling versus providing services, smoothening flow of work instead of strict time bound plans and finally business value instead of cost control!