Winning bullshit bingo with Agile :) ?
Hi friends, I want to share my personal Agile story with you. The story is about one foundational layer that exists in many modern Agile approaches — the philosophy. Normally Agile approaches convey their philosophy through values and principles. When I got my fist Scrum certificate in 2015 I was not sure why exactly Scrum values were needed. At that time the values were perceived by me as “we are for all good and against all bad”, to be more straightforward all that sounded like a perfect stragety for winning in the bullshitshit bingo game. Unlike things like proper sprint planning or refinements which were bringing instant value to the processes and subsequently the product.
Unfortunately, I still can’t cite a good book explaining how those immaterial things work. If you know a book explaining that — please reference it the comments.
After some years, I sorted all out for myself and want to share with you: no process can describe all possible situations in a complex, rapidly changing environment. Values and principles help to make decisions in such situations where we don’t have a clear process. While validating a decision you can assess how it will affect your values and principles. That’s it, as simple as that.
Example. As a senior manager, you are validating the idea to outsource some part of your work. Let’s see how Agile approaches can facilitate the decision making process:
Disciplined Agile Delivery and Scaled Agile Framework will point out to “Take an economic view”, “Be Pragmatic”, thus it’s very likely that it will make you lean towards thinking that outsourcing is a good option. LeSS and Scrum, on the other hand, will remind you that outsourcing will impact transparency and will make you evaluate things better.
Principles/values of popular Agile approaches:
- Disciplined Agile Delivery https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile/mindset/mindset-principles
- Saled Agile Framework https://www.scaledagileframework.com/safe-lean-agile-principles/
- Less https://less.works/less/principles/overview
- Scrum https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#scrum-values
