Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
With no offence, and taking into account that English is not my first language, please let me say that one of the worst things I find in our profession which helps to create a lot of confusion into the market is to use the word "agile" as an adjective and talk about "agile project management", "agile project manager", "agile requirements management", etc. etc. I fully believe and I can sustain that it is not right. For example, you have project management defined by the PMI that you can apply with different life cycles or approach (waterfall, iterative, risk oriented, etc) but that is not mean that you have "agile project management". I think we need to stop to use this type of way to name things. Saving Changes...
"Agile" went down the road PM already had to take - just name it and everything will be better - at least in people's expectations. In our projects we always define what we mean by saying XYZ first to acquire a common understanding. This helps a lot. Even our customers know that there is a strong movement away from the word "agile" as Dave nailed it in this post:
I strongly disagree with Sergio. Anything and everthing can be called agile since we understand we are talking about flexibility and speed in that specific area. We can have agile requirements management if we are flexible in bringjng changes to requirements with speed. Same is true for project management, software development, and even contruction. Agile is very much a valid adjective, only if we know why and where are we using it. Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
@Suhail, to use agile as an adjective contributes to general confusion about what agile is. For example, "agile project management" does not exists. What exists is project management practices that you apply in different project life cycles. This type of things are not good for people like me who are trying to use and implement agile from the very beginning of the agile concept born. Saving Changes...
Alistair DuguidTechnical Delivery Manager| Informatica CorporationShelton, Ct, United States
Still, it's kind of shouting into the wind to rail against the use of "agile" as an adjective - because in the English language, that's exactly what it is, an adjective. You may as well complain about "meeting" being used as a noun.
In fact, plenty of people complain about "agile" being used as a noun, as in "we're doing Agile", and argue strongly that it should stay as an adjective, so there are plenty of viewpoints on the topic.
Perhaps what you meant Sergio was that the word "agile" is fashionable right now, and is therefore overused? I'd agree with that - it seems every product, every service being promoted right now is "agile" or promotes "business agility" or some similar poorly defined concept.
But what can we do about that? People will use a word if it is popular, and yes, they will misuse it as well. Our job as agilists is to try to keep using the word correctly ourselves, and with the meaning we intend. If enough of us do this, businesspeople in general will evewntually learn what we mean.
We are at a difficult stage right now in "Agile" - we have passed the early adopter stage, and now every IT executive, every project manager, every vendor is trying to claim that they are "agile". Much of it is nonsense, but it's the price we pay for having agile methods enter the mainstream! The bright side is that "agile" is seen as something good, that everyone is rushing to adopt! Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
I agree with you Alistair. Thanks for your comments. Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
Thank you very much Christina. I will take a look to the blog post. Saving Changes...
It has been standardised way back in 2001 and in frequent use for decades. The set of iterative and other lean methods of doing a project have been collected and compiled into a common term called agile. Else you have to name it like Scrum, XP, Lean, FDD, Crystals (many methods), DSDM, Kanban and et al. So by looking at what we have in our repertoire, it is only easy to understand, accept and use agile in general to differentiate it from traditional waterfall methods. This just makes our life easy. Saving Changes...
Thank you Alistair for clarifying the point and I completely and fully agree with you. This also helps me in understanding Sergio's point of view and I tend to understand his dilemma as well. I am also very much against this new fashion of using the word agile with everything. If it is correctly used, I still maintain, there is a lot of space where agility can apply. We just have to keep an open mind and be able to sort out trash from treasure, because we do not want to kill any genuine ideas and research paths just by saying the word agile cannot be used anywhere else but the original conception. This ide in itself is in contradiction to philosophy of agile. You cannot bound or bar it with ready made standards and rules. Let it creatively expand and evolve. Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
Arul: the point is that there is not traditional or non-traditional methods. You can use agile principles with any life cycle you use. For example, waterfall. And when I write "agile principles" I am not referring to software because agile started years before the agile software development movement. Saving Changes...
Yes, its become fashionable to put Agile behind everything related to project management, especially in proposals. And every organization wants to display agile in bold letters and it might be futile to protest against such widespread use of agile (the word not the practice). Yet I agree with Sergio that it tends to create a confusion about what is really agile. Saving Changes...
