What's Next in Agile?

Situation: You need a practical perspective on Agile approaches.

Alan Shalloway is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives. With more than thirty-five years of experience, Alan is an industry thought leader, trainer, and coach in the areas of lean software development, the lean-agile connection, Scrum, agile architecture and using design patterns in agile environments. He is a popular speaker at prestigious conferences worldwide. Alan is the primary author of Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design and is currently writing a book on Lean Anti-Patterns.  He is also a frequent trainer and speaker for SQE Training.

We recently got a few of his thoughts on the state of Agile and how its being applied.



Q.  We've been hearing a lot about SCRUM and Lean lately on Gantthead.  Are you still seeing increased usage of Agile processes in the IT space?  In other disciplines?

A.  Agile process continue to increase in both the IT space and in product development. All areas of software development are adopting it.  Scrum has caught on in many areas because of its ability to solve certain problems regarding the development team reasonably easily.  Lean is catching on because although it is easy to start with Scrum, dealing with the more involved challenges of spreading Agile beyond the team requires more than Scrum readily provides.


Q.  Which flavor of Agile is most popular right now and why?  Are the flavors industry-specific?

A.  Scrum is definitely the most popular.  It has jumped to the forefront for several reasons:
1)    It has created a community of practitioners that are very vocal about its benefits and whom make a living from being certified by the Scrum Alliance
2)    Merely forming Scrum teams in many IT organizations will result in increased team productivity because of the co-location and minimizing thrashing which results
3)    It is a straightforward way to enable teams to adopt iterative development, which is inherently a more effective approach in most cases

Unfortunately, Scrum is proving difficult to scale to the entire enterprise. Even at the team level, Scrum evangelists acknowledge Scrum fails about two-thirds of the time. The Scrum community has tried to expand its definition from its original objective to helping teams to trying to help the entire enterprise.  This bottom-up approach is not effective. It is much better to start with an approach that is designed to optimize the entire enterprise and work down.


Q.  In general, where do you think the Agile movement is headed over the next 5 years?

A.  As Agile moves more from local teams to the entire enterprise, you will see Agile teams embracing Lean principles as the primary driver.  This is what we call Lean-Agile: using Lean thinking to create a context for Agile principles and practices. We (Net Objectives and SQE) have already started this transition as our clients have been on the forefront of taking Agile methods throughout their organizations.  Lean is based on principles that have a half-century history of success.


Q.  What is driving the change you've just described?

A.  While teams can solve the impediments they face at the team level with the "inspect and adapt" mandate of Scrum, the challenges in their way at the Enterprise level require the proven practices of Lean thinking.  Lean is a thought process that can be used in any industry to speed up delivery while improving quality and achieving lower costs.  Lean thinking is very consistent with the intent of Agile and Scrum. It therefore provides great insights into how to solve problems agile teams and organizations face.


Q.  The latest version of the PMBOK is said to address the merging of Agile methods and the PMBOK approach.  What are your thoughts on that?

A.  Trying to merge XP and Scrum (the two most popular Agile methods) may prove difficult. Practitioners of XP and Scrum often have quite strong resistance to management and process, defending the local team at nearly all cost.
To be successful, Lean thinking will be required as a starting point Lean thinking defines process as the agreement by an organization about how work is done; in addition, it expects processes to change as better ways of working are discovered. It affirms the value of both standard work and local knowledge. Process becomes the baseline for change.  As long as PMBOK does not consider process to be static, PMBOK and Lean-Agile can be somewhat complimentary.


Q.  When approaching projects from an Agile perspective, what are the most important skills for a PM to have?

A.  Be focused on results not on following the process.  The process should assist the team because it helps them get their job done.  You cannot impose a process on a team.  The PM is not a servant leader as many say in the Agile world. Rather, they are providing leadership to the team, improving the process which the team works while staying focused on having the team provide business value.  Leadership, communication and coaching skills are essential for the effective PM.