Critical Agile Memes

Critical Agile Memes

[From the Archive: Originally posted at Amplify.com May 17, 2011]

One topic of the recent #lru2011 London Rightshifting Unconference was “Adopting the Agile Mindset”, and to kick off the topic we chose to attempt definitions of those terms, so that we might be all on the same page.

In the course of that discussion, we surfaced the following “Critical Agile Memes”:

Agile adoption means personal change – not just for developers, but for other folks across the whole organisation. And by personal change here, we mean coming to see the world (and the world of work) from a different perspective.

Agile adoption means a focus on delivery of value – early and often – By value we mean, things of value to stakeholders; and by early we mean within a few days or weeks (sometimes even, hours) of starting a new project.

Agile adoption means understanding that people are different – seeing people as individuals, and recognising that a one-size-fits-all attitude to people has serious drawbacks.

I’ve posted these three memes here as I thought them worthy of recording, and because I find it very interesting that we focussed on these three (and not, for example, the multitude of other “what is agile?” memes).

– Bob