I believe teams stand a better chance of realising project success when they demonstrate agility. I define agility to be the ability to deliver value to customers in a continuous flow that realises maximum return on investment for the business while dealing with change in a rational and empirical way. And having lots of fun doing it.
Achieving agility isn't easy. It's partly about process and practices but its real capability comes from the culture and mind-set established by the underlying values and principles. Agility requires awareness, discipline, sound judgement and courage, plus a trusting and empowering environment that understands small failures to be important learning experiences. Often teams focus on the process element and the practices or adapt things before they've even tried them. And, in the name of adaptation, they make compromises to maintain a fit with their organisation structure, corporate culture, command-and-control environment and current working practices (that's right the ones that have been resulting in failure). Compromises are not necessarily a bad thing, except when they undermine the values and principles, leading to what I call a state of compromised agility, i.e. a degraded capacity to deliver value to customers - flow is interrupted and return on investment is diminished. This can re-introduce some risk to the project.
Many organisations, despite trying to be agile, still see their projects fail. Why? In many cases I believe they are practicing compromised agility. Perhaps they don't understand the cultural aspect of what is required to achieve success using an agile approach. Or perhaps they lack the conviction to bring about the organisational changes necessary to give a team a fighting chance of achieving agility.
In my opinion, compromising the values and principles, to make Agile more acceptable to the organisation or apparently easier for people to perform leads to compromised agility and nurtures an accepted mediocrity that increases the chances of project failure.
My yardstick for agility, and whether it's compromised, is the following 'handbook':
VALUE
IF you don't repeatedly release software
into a production environment
at least once every month
that realises business value
for a real customer...
QUALITY
IF you're not paying constant attention to technical excellence
with simple, effective, incremental design
driven by continuous, repeatable automated testing
with at least 95% coverage...
LEARNING
IF you're not learning
by inspecting and reflecting every iteration
and you're not re-planning, adapting and improving
all of the time based on what you've learnt...
TEAM
IF your team is not empowered to self-organise and be creative,
does not sit together and engage in face-to-face communication,
does not include your customer
and all the necessary skills to make its own decisions and take immediate action...
THEN YOU HAVE COMPROMISED YOUR AGILITY
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