Agility and Postponing Decisions: Why and How

Gil Broza specializes in increasing organizational agility and team performance with minimal risk and thrashing. Dozens of companies seeking transformations, makeovers or improvements have relied on his pragmatic, modern and respectful support for customizing agile in their contexts. His book "The Agile Mind-Set" helps practitioners go beyond process and adopt a true agile approach to work. His book "The Human Side of Agile" is a practical book on leading agile teams to greatness. These days, several of the world's largest organizations are having him train hundreds of their managers in technology and business (up to VP level) on practical agile leadership. Get Gil's popular 20-session mini-program "Something Happened on the Way to Agile" free at OnTheWayToAgile.com.

  Agile  

Did you know that agile has an explicit and core principle guiding decision making? You can’t be agile without following it. It’s called “deferring decisions to the last possible moment."

If you’ve chosen to approach work in an agile way, you’ve probably put in place roles, artifacts, meetings, tools, lingo and teams. That’s fine, but not enough--the agile principles must permeate your actions. The principle we explore here has to do with not making decisions earlier than you have to. It is critical for agility, because work--especially knowledge work--is an endless stream of decision making.

Making decisions early
Waterfall thinking guides you to collect, vet and approve all the requirements before you design and implement any solution. Presumably, that means you will base your decisions on maximum information. But in any significant project, the requirements signoff milestone is too early, occurring weeks or months before the last responsible moment. Come implementation time, some of those requirements may have changed or become obsolete. The same applies to “big design up front”: Some of the design might be invalidated (or proven untenable) come implementation time. Some requirements and designs need to be made early, but not all of them.

Agile Thinking
Let’s consider a simple example of agile …

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