Understanding Why Agile Is the Way it Is

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile  

I recently wrote an article here on the problems that I had with people advocating for “pure” agile—the idea that only agile practices represented at the time the Agile Manifesto was written were appropriate. It generated a fair amount of response, and one of the things that came out of it was an invitation to speak with my good friend Dave Prior on his podcast. (Dave is a well-known agile thought leader and gives me a run for my money when it comes to being opinionated!)

In that previous article, one of the topics that we discussed as part of the consideration of the issues was the idea of whether it was important to understand the background to a particular approach—whether it be agile or anything else.

If you understand how, does why matter?
With agile in its current form (having been around for close to quarter of a century now), there are a lot of agile practitioners—team members, product owners, ScrumMasters, project managers, whatever—who have never worked in an environment where agile wasn’t part of how work got delivered.

There are also doubtless a lot of those people who learned how to work in an agile environment in the various roles without ever considering why things were done in a certain way. To them, it’s just another approach that they learned.

I am sure that those individuals are more than capable of…

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