The Agile Mindset
The Agile Mindset
The Agile Mindset starts with the Agile Values:
(adapted to support "Agile for Everything and Agile for Everyone")
- Human interactions over processes and tools
- Working solutions over excessive documentation
- Customer collaboration over rigid contracts
- Responding to change over following a plan
The opposite of Agile is rigid, fixed or bureaucratic.
The speed in Agile come about through being nimble and flexible rather than by trying to turn the cogs faster.
An organisation which is Agile is able to:
- Respond to change quickly
- Deliver value early and often – and iterates regularly
- Solve complex problems in a predictable way
- Reduce risk and waste
- Break things down into manageable pieces which can be delivered quickly
- Follow a vision and a high-level roadmap which adapts to the inevitable changing environment and circumstances
- Make evidence-based decisions by gathering and responding to empirical data
- Start small and experiment
- Be pragmatic
- Just get the job done!
Why we are Agile enthusiasts...
Outcomes
1. Deliver early, deliver often. Delivering value, faster, better, more cost effectively.
2. Dealing with complexity and responding to change while reducing risk.
End users and Feedback
3. User-centric, iterative, incremental, early delivery of Value with a fast feedback loop.
4. Building the right thing and building the thing right.
Decision Making
5. Empirical, evidence based decision making.
6. Transparency, a visible process, allowing for continuous Inspection and Adaptation.
Teamwork and team members
7. Collaborating, self-organising, cross-functional teams, supported by emotionally intelligent servant leaders.
8. Continuous improvement and continuous personal growth in a safe, exciting and motivating environment
Risk Management
9. Governance is built in.
10. Start small. Experimenting and problem solving to reduce complexity and increase predictability.
The Benefits of an Agile Mindset
Increased:
Value
Flow
Collaboration
Accountability
Transparency
Trust
Morale and performance
Cost Control
Problem Solving Ability
Responsiveness to Change
Speed of Feedback
Quality of Decision-making
Reduced:
Risk
Waste
Bureaucracy
Time financially "in the red"
Delivering:
Value early and often
What customers actually want and need
Early Revenue Generation
Continuous Improvement
Using:
All the Brains in the Organisation
Lightweight Governance
What is Agile? - how others describe it
Atlassian
Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. Instead of betting everything on a "big bang" launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments. Requirements, plans, and results are evaluated continuously so teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change quickly.
Simon Reindl - advanced product delivery
Agile is a broad range of frameworks and techniques that focus on using fast feedback, and an iterative incremental approach.
Professor Michael A. Cusumano of MIT Sloan School of Management
“[Agility] comes in different forms, but basically it’s the ability to quickly adapt to or even anticipate and lead change.
Agility in the broadest form affects strategic thinking, operations, technology innovation and the ability to innovate in products, processes and business models.”
Marina Alex - founder of SWAY
Agile is a company culture based on creating value for the customer.
It is a special mindset shared by employees whose attention is focused on goals and the concerns of the consumer. In this frame of reference, the client becomes the boss of every associate in the company, not just the boss of the sales manager.
The company is then able to function as a single organism whose purpose is to find out what the customer needs as quickly as possible and fulfill those needs faster than their competitors.
Forbes - Steve Denning
Agile’s emergence as a huge global movement extending beyond software is driven by the discovery that the only way for organizations to cope with today’s turbulent customer-driven marketplace is to become Agile. Agile enables organizations to master continuous change. It permits firms to flourish in a world that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
Agile Alliance
Agile is the ability to create and respond to change. It is a way of dealing with, and ultimately succeeding in, an uncertain and turbulent environment.
Wrike
Agile is a process by which a team can manage a project by breaking it up into several stages and involving constant collaboration with stakeholders and continuous improvement and iteration at every stage.
APM
Agile project management is an iterative approach to delivering a project throughout its life cycle.
Miriam-Webster
having a quick resourceful and adaptable character
//an agile mind
Alistair...
"Agile" is a collection of ideas, frameworks and practices which include Scrum, Kanban, DevOps, Lean, Continuous Improvement, and others, as well as frameworks which have not yet been invented.
These frameworks are often combined and tweaked by the more experienced Agile professionals as they adapt to the organisations they are supporting, and apply the relevant elements from the frameworks to get things done.
Agile itself is not the goal.
Having an Agile Mindset is the key (see below), whereas following a framework too religiously almost always leads to problems.
Agile was originally envisioned to deliver software, however it is a mindset which can applied to almost every aspect of business or life: Agile for Everything and Agile for Everyone.
Scrum is a framework for getting complex problems solved and delivered at the highest possible value and get them delivered quickly.
What is an Agile Mindset? - how others describe it
Smart Insights
An agile mindset is about creating and responding to change in uncertain and turbulent environments. It’s about thinking through how you can understand what’s going on in the environment, identify what uncertainty you’re facing and figure out how to adapt as you go along.
Simon Reindl - advanced product delivery
An agile mindset is a way of approaching things.
Susan McIntosh - infoq.com
An agile mindset is the set of attitudes supporting an agile working environment. These include respect, collaboration, improvement and learning cycles, pride in ownership, focus on delivering value, and the ability to adapt to change. This mindset is necessary to cultivate high-performing teams, who in turn deliver amazing value for their customers.
Luke Pivac - writing on Medium
It is an attitude that supports the agile working environment through core values, these include:
- Respect: Working with your team as a collective; united in your vision, purpose, and goal.
- Collaboration: As mentioned above, you need to have the ability to work with your team and carry empathy for Your customers’ needs. This is what drives the value in the work you do.
- Learning cycles: Responding to change means learning from failure and making improvements to do better next time.
- Improvement: The output from learning cycles is your ability to learn from what works and what has not. And adapt from what you learned to improve, first slowly and then at a rapid pace. The beauty is that it is organic — because it is intrinsic on the process, you improve in small incremental changes.
- Accountability: By working as a team and taking pride in ownership of the work you, you become accountable to yourself and the team.
- Being adaptive: This is about focusing on delivering value, and the ability to adapt to change.
Forbes - Steve Denning
Some resorted to the Supreme Court’s approach to defining pornography: “You know it when you see it.” Yet over time, the nature and content of the Agile mindset have clarified, particularly by way of contrast to the bureaucratic mindset that is still prevalent in many large organizations.
Practitioners are thus said to have an Agile mindset when they are preoccupied—and sometimes obsessed—with innovating and delivering steadily more customer value, with getting work done in small self-organizing teams, and with collaborating together in an interactive network.
ICAgile
We believe that agile is not a process, methodology, or framework; it is a mindset that welcomes uncertainty, embraces challenges, empowers individuals, and views failure as a learning opportunity. Adopting an agile mindset unleashes the brilliance of people and teams, which enables rapid discovery and faster innovation.
Miriam-Webster
having a quick resourceful and adaptable character
//an agile mind
