I find it fascinating talking to people about their agile implementation. Some people immediately claim they’re agile by describing the practices they use. I often ask a few more questions such as, “How is that working for you?” and they start to describe a number of problems they have. Another answer people often give is, “We’ve been doing agile for ages!”
“Doing agile” has never been the point. The agile mindset is about working with customers or stakeholders to deliver solutions whilst always continually improving. The practices are simply ways of getting there. It’s never been about what you do. What matters is how you do it.
Improving how you do something is easy yet requires constant discipline. First, you need to be continually asking yourself, “How does this practice help us?” and searching for answers to another, “How can we get better at this?” Talking to people outside your organisations often help, as does following what other people do around the world (made easy through social channels like twitter and blogs).
Good post, horrible title.
I’ve so rarely gotten any improvement other than by changing what I did. (For instance – instead of letting end users test my code, I started taking an interest in testing it myself.)
“Improvement by ardent desire” doesn’t work.
Improvement by changing what you do will work – sometimes. More precisely, all improvement requires changing what you do; though not every change in what you do translates into improvement.
I tend to ask some of the same questions you ask, and they work well for me. (I used to not ask those questions, in fact not even know them; now I do, and things work out better.)
Hi Laurent,
Thanks for your comments and feedback. Looking at the title, I guess it’s very context driven so maybe it doesn’t make sense. I agree improvement never happens without action. However, I think action without intent is destined to unwind or stay stagnant.
Even the first thing you do often has some intent. You took the risk to try something different.