Age and experience are weird things. Imposter Syndrome not withstanding, it’s weird to think that a few years ago my opinions on topics – personal and professional – were that much less informed. As I get older, and experience more, I better understand why some adults in my life were constantly changing their minds and persona views (and encouraging me to do the same), and why those that never did often ended up being so miserly.
But this post isn’t about grumpy adults! This is about how my opinions on agile ways of working have changed the more I’ve worked in agile ways. Go figure!
For starters, let’s talk about certifications. When I mention that, to which organization does your mind go, if at all? Is it Scrum Alliance? Scaled Agile? ICAgile? When I was new to Agile, certifications meant everything to me. It was a point of pride, and proof that I had “done the work.” In reality, I hadn’t done much of anything, and applying any learnings from a CSM class proved way more difficult than any test Scrum Alliance could put in front of me. Understanding that teams were made up of people, and people had their own motivations, opened my eyes to how much coaching had almost nothing to do with the framework you were applying.
Frameworks are tricky things: They purport to be a solution that will solve a problem – be it scaling, or how to organize work, or how to innovate. But they are not solutions, really. Frameworks are a tool – or collection of tools – that need to be applied correctly, with precision, to see any positive results.
Take the example of a building a wooden coffee table: There are instructions for how to do so, and it’s clear what tools you need to get the job done. But the instructions don’t tell you how the tools operate, or what setup you’ll need to actually use the tools – they assume you’ve figure all that out. But if you fail to give yourself the space and fail to practice using your tools, you’ll find yourself struggling the entire time you build that table. And should you actually complete the damn thing, you may find that it wasn’t worth it and next time you’ll just buy something pre-made. You may not feel that accomplished at all.
Agile can feel a bit like building something, or baking, if that’s your bag. There are dozens of instructions and schematics and recipes out there, but without practice and forethought, Agile can feel like a slog. It can be impressively demotivating.
I used to feel Agile was cultish, and exclusive: I couldn’t understand coaches claiming that Agile was “a mindset.” And yet years later, here I am having incredibly nuanced conversations about the intention Scaled Agile (of all things.) These conversations, today, come easy to me. There’s value in the edge cases, and an honest conversation about what we can expect from all these solutions and certifications is useful to have before pursuing them.
The Agile community continues to evolve its thinking on fundamental best practices. Story Points and velocity are on their way out, while throughput and predictability are becoming more widely accepted metrics. We’re learning how all this stuff actually works now that we’ve built a few wooden tables and tweaked the toolkit a bit. It’s good, if not a bit challenging, and I refuse to get too grumpy about it.
Goscin.ski 