After I went over the various reasons why Agile may be perceived dead, or undead, it’s time to take a look on the reasons why Agile is alive – and I think it will remain so for some time. Maybe the goldrush times of Agile are over, but there are certainly some things that will stick. Let’s explore again.
Other entries in this series:
Maybe the various methodologies will go away, maybe they will be replaced with the next thing. Still, I think, there are many vital lessons that we will take with us into a potential post-Agile world.
One thing that Agile methodologies emphasized the most if probably to work more effectively rather than more efficiently. Effectiveness in this context means to do the right things, while efficiency means to do the things the right way. Rather than sticking to doing the wrong things righter, we learned how to do the right things in the first place, and eventually getting to a state where we can do them efficiently as well.
On this topic, there are many skills of a Scrum Master, that can help us to do the right things by offering an outside perspective, creating the right atmosphere to come up with a decision as a team, or just by challenging us to think outside the box.
Even if we abandon many more things in the post-Agile world, getting people to do the right things is certainly a topic that not only applies to an Agile world, but beyond that.
Of course, that raises the meta question of how do we know what the right things are? The reflective mindset of a Scrum Master that challenges us to get in touch with real users before relying on too many assumptions will come in handy there as well.
But what are the things that groups of people or teams will be working on in the companies in the post-Agile world? Certainly, there will be companies that will work on providing technically feasible products that users want and generate a continuous revenue stream for them.
I recall I once researched the origins of the famous comic on what the customer wanted, what the architect came up with, what the designer ended up with, and so on. To my surprise the original comic was published in a newspaper in the year 1973. That’s when I realized how old this problem actually is.
All that said, we will most likely need people that not only can deliver a product in a short amount of time, but also people with the tools at hand to know what is valuable to users out there, and how to build that in iterative-incremental cycles. In other words, we will need the whole skillset of good product owners that act as entrepreneurs in organizations, and invite users, stakeholders, and the team to co-create products that people are willing to pay for.
And we will certainly also need people that can deliver the implementations of those products. Those people need the skillset of programmers, but also other skills like risk-exploration, user experience design, documentation, and the like. In other words, we will need people contributing to developing a product.
Especially in larger organizations we will also need people that help people with all those different skillsets to thrive. Sometimes the serveant leader of a Scrum Master alone is not enough. Then we might need people with lateral leadership skills. Those people can make all the other aware of the different constraints within they are expected to organize themselves. You may call them managers, line managers, or even Scrum Masters.
All that said, to me it seems all those skills in the different roles in the agile methodologies are needed, even if we discontinue calling it all by the term Agile. But if we need all those skills, how come we may think Agile is dead then? I don’t think so, that’s why I claim that Agile is well alive, we just have not found the words to bring that message across in a concise, digestable way for all the people out there to hear it.
