Agile - The Origin Story
Part 1 of 3
I have been wanting to write about agility for a while now; and given that this is a topic that is very close to my heart, it may turn into a three- or four-week series.
I first came across the term “agile” back in 2012, when I joined the REA Group in Melbourne. The REA Group is the company who owns digital assets like realestate.com.au and many others in the property industry. At that point, it was one of or the leading organisations “doing” agile in Melbourne, possibly even Australia. It was certainly one of the pioneers in that field in this country. I was lucky to join at the same time as the new CIO, a gentleman named Nigel Dalton, who some people call “the godfather of agile” in Australia.
I say I was lucky because Nigel became a bit of a mentor for me, and for many other people at REA; and in a beautiful way, he sprinkled the goodness of this approach to work amongst many teams and the organisation as a whole. I didn’t work in IT or in digital product; my role was leading Customer Experience and Sales Operations; two areas that back then had not used or heard of agile at all. So, with a mixture of mentoring, coaching, lots of reading, learning and a supportive organisation that allowed me to try different things and approaches, I became a fully converted advocate to agile; but also, to some of its “cousins” like lean and systems thinking.
To understand agile and agility, we need to understand where it came from.
The term was coined in 2001 when a group of 17 people, mainly software development practitioners, got together to discuss these new approaches that were emerging in their field. They were trying to find commonalities and a shared language and understanding for running IT or software development projects. These approaches had emerged as a response to some big failures in large projects that were run using waterfall project management. They spent a few days together and they came up with what was called” The agile manifesto”. I am not going to detail it here, you can google it, but it was a set of values (4) and principles (12) that tried to describe this new approach.
What I always found fascinating is that they didn’t come up with a step-by-step rulebook on how to do this agile thing; instead they came up with a set of values and principles; leaving everyone the freedom to create their own practices or ways of applying these values and principles within their context. In a way, it was more a mindset than a methodology to run projects – which is where I think most people got it wrong after that (more on this next week).
So, what is that “famous” agile mindset that I talk about and that we hear so much in organisations these days?
Well, in my opinion, the agile mindset is underpinned by some of the values and principles from the manifesto. Things like: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools, Being responsive to change, Deliver frequently, Cross functional teams, Have regular face to face communication, Simplicity, Self-organising teams, etc…
Further to this, Jeff Sutherland, one of the creators of the agile manifesto wrote about the key behaviours that enable the agile mindset in teams. In his view, there were these five:
· Respect for the worth of every person
· Truth in every communication
· Transparency of all data, actions, and decisions
· Trust that each person will support the team
· Commitment to the team and to the team’s goals
He was talking about the key behaviours that enable the agile mindset in teams. In my mind those 5 things: Respect, Communication, Transparency, Trust and Collaboration are probably also the key to achieve agility at an organisational level.