We have come to understand that Agile is about making decisions that promote and improve Agility. Every decision we make is influenced by our experience, and our principles and values. In our journey to become more Agile, we sometimes have to unlearn deeply held values built from our experience, and we have to explicitly invoke new principles, which we eventually internalise. To support the Agile Manifesto in 2001, the authors articulated a set of principles for software development, which have stood the test of time remarkably well. Many have tried to improve on the Manifesto and the principles, but few if any have succeeded. We don't do software development, so we rethought our own agile principles for general management. We don't claim these principles are new or innovative - you may have seen similar ideas before. But these are the ones that seem to work best for us. We are still refining and distilling our principles, but here are our Agile current principles:
Principle
| Description | Outcomes over route
| A clear committed view of the customer's value
based outcomes is top of the agenda and
essential to drive and govern change – the route is negotiable | Direction over design
| We pay less attention to designing a detailed solution, and more attention to the direction we want to go | Now over later
| We focus on what can be done now to realise value, rather than what might be useful in two years time | Flexibility over certainty
| The project structure is flexible
and adaptable – we have to operate with uncertainty and be able
to adapt to new business drivers, changing circumstances and new
opportunities, using the resources immediately available. | Incremental over completeness
| Change, and value, are delivered in incremental
steps – with a strong emphasis on getting change live, “learning as we go” from
good and bad experience, and hunting out further benefits.
| Iterative over decomposition
| We use an iterative “deliver –
operate - review - learn cycle” that is key to navigating through the
change work with a key dependency on measuring and proving results. | Fixed time/cost over fixed requirement
| Change work is time boxed, and
rapid continuous steps of change will be delivered frequently (weeks rather
than months). Build a working solution within the business case
to get benefits flowing.
| “Good enough” over perfection
| We apply the lean model of “just
enough” or “least necessary” to realise the value, and
avoid wasting effort on “niceties in the solution”. | Empowerment over directives
| We encourage self organising empowered
teams
to deliver change. Teams are empowered
to make decisions; good leadership from above ensures the teams make the right decisions.
| Resolve over
assume
| Act early to resolve issues one way or another rather than carry the uncertainty of assumptions and risks | Human contact over digital dialogue
| Face to face communication and
regular (daily) dialogue with team and stakeholders is more effective, not just at communicating the immediate message, but also at building common understandings, and highlighting areas of misunderstanding | | | |
We'll keep refining these principles, as we learn more from our work with clients. | 