Agile – A culture shift and getting used to it

When you transition away from the world of Waterfall to Agile, you may get a sense of being a little disorganised at least initially. For example, with Waterfall you document and do everything in an order with a documented outcome before the next step is taken, which is almost synonymous to being organised. So when you move away from Waterfall to Agile, you are experiencing a cultural shift in the way you work.  If you take pride in being organised as an individual then you may get initial shock when you are introduced to the world of Agile. So resistance is all but natural. Let me share my take on what goes on when you have spent years mastering waterfall and then you are asked to go Agile.

To start with, let’s take a quick look at some of the dictionary meanings of ‘being organised‘.

– arrange systematically
– arrange according to a particular system
– Able to plan one’s activities efficiently.

Now, Agile on the other hand gives you 4 guiding principles as defined in Agile Manifesto and these are

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

So you have 4 vaguely sounding boundaries. Now every single principle in the manifesto can be interpreted in many ways and hence there are multiple possibilities to execute a project. Therefore, Agile comes loaded with a number of frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, XP among others to help you stay organised and execute things efficiently. To give you an analogy, think of Agile as PHP, and Agile Frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban as PHP Frameworks such as Laravel, Symfony, etc.

Adapting to a new culture

It takes some time and effort before one can get used to a new culture. Any cultural change requires one to

• be open minded to unlearn and learn
• be curious and to ask questions
• take help from someone who knows the culture
• read about the culture
• be ready to make mistakes
• find someone who is undertaking the similar journey

One can become anxious during the process but it pays to be patient. And so when you are out to learn Agile frameworks, keep the above guidelines in mind.

Choosing a language

Agile has number of frameworks to choose from. Some of the popular ones are Scrum, Kanban, XP and Lead. I’m only familiar with the first two. So will talk about these.

Let’s look at their origins to understand their use cases.

• SCRUM was created by someone who wanted to bring down the cost and time of software development projects.
• Kanban was created on a factory floor in an operation environment.

So I’ll say choose SCRUM for projects in development and Kanban for projects post-development i.e. when in Operation.

Each Agile framework has its own set of activities, roles and artefacts that help you produce software efficiently. I’ll refrain from choosing the word ‘organised’ in the context of Agile frameworks since that’s not their primary goal.

Before I conclude this post, let me remind you what happens when you learn a new culture – you may forget the previous one! 😉

References

• https://agilemanifesto.org/
• https://cmhc.utexas.edu/cultureadjustment.html