A few years ago, I went to a 3 day course which was described as an Agile Boot Camp. Since the company I was with at that time was in the infant stages of an Agile transformation strategy, this seemed like a great course for the project management team (all 3 of us).
The boot camp was full of great information and really got us pumped about what we were about to do. We spent an entire day talking about sprint ceremonies and how to use them properly. We discussed user stories and their relationship to epics, features, et cetera.
The class was awesome, but there was one major problem which I didn't really notice at the time....The class wasn't an Agile boot camp; It was a Scrum Boot Camp.
Agile is so much more than just Scrum. It's so much more than Kanban or XP or SAFe.
Agile is the why. The framework (such as Scrum or XP) is the how.Just the other day, Mike Cottmeyer wrote a really great post about why frameworks and methodologies don't matter. If someone asks you to describe Agile and you give them an overview of Scrum, you're really short-changing them by giving such a limiting view of the Agile Manifesto, which is the set of guiding principles for Agile.
Agile is a mindset and a way of thinking. The Agile values can certainly be implemented through the use of a framework like Scrum, but Scrum is not Agile!
If you were in an elevator with a colleague and they asked you, "What is Agile?" How would you explain Agile to them in 1 or 2 sentences? Leave me a comment with your "elevator pitch."
Posts
Great post Lindsay! I'm brand new to the world of Agile, so hopefully I'm not way off, but here would be my elevator pitch...
ReplyDelete"Agile is a way of doing Software Development to minimize or eliminate waste and only deliver high value software through staying close to your customers and working in short iterative sprints to deliver what the customer actually NEEDS"