Diagnose Dysfunction and Alleviate Pain of Approaches to Agility

Those have been the originale promises of agility.

• Simplifying the relationships between customer and developer,
• Creating value for customers in a more effective way,
• Continuously improving upon our ways in finding solutions to business problems

Rarely have they materialized over the last years.

We are observing another tendency:

• The small and fluid ways of working with Scrum and Kanban are adapted to fit  complicated processes.
• Big and clumsy processes are not being broken up into small and lean ways.
• Instead huge and clumsy frameworks are built using agile ideas as brickstones.

Frustration among agile workers is growing. They feel the agile movement being subverted, diluted and perverted.

Instead of trying to make things better, many people simply succumb to circumstances, believing efforts to be futile

Opinions abound and controversy is on the rise as proponents of different flavors of agility are clashing.

I feel “Disillusioned by Agile?” is the best suited title. It expresses the feelings of many. But it also questions their definiteness.

I want to help to ground the discussion to the original principles of agility. And I want to shine a light on the traps and pitfalls we tend to fall in, as we are living through agile transformations.

And I hope to make sense of all the controversial ideas that are thrown at us. Additionally I will provide you with some heuristics to judge your current situation.

At the same time I give you some hints on what you can do to obtain better results following the original agile principles in the messy reality we are living in.