Agile in non-IT projects

When i was studying for the PMI-ACP exam, one of my colleagues looked at my books and commented that a lot of Agile is about good leadership/management. That really speaks to applying the principles to all sorts of work. (I work in non-profit so i hesitate to say industry).

And to create a new brand of biscuits in my actual work place using Scrum framework (jejejeje). The important thing to not fail is: 1-Agile is not about to cut cost, to deliver faster, to put changes when you want in the life cycle process, etc. Each time an organization hired me to implement Agile from 1993 up to date I am spending time to explain that Agile is not about. I prefer to setup clear expectations instead of start working and short time after being fired for not achieving the expectations. 2-by defintion Agile is A way of thought and behave whose focus is the increase of value for the client and the quality. So, your organization must define "client", "value" and "quality" first. I mean is an strategical matter. 3-when you implement Agile you gain into agility which is Be able respond to a wide variety of unexpected external surprises and create external surprises.Being agile will assist businesses who face unpredictable circumstances.That is the key differece with flexibility which is gained with Lean. KEY: all these stuff demmands a TRANSFORMATION whic mean To prepare the Enterprise Architecture driven for systemic theory and existing internal and external knowledge with focus on Agile concepts.

*scrum to eat biscuits!

Sergio, your statement on setting expectations, not overpromising and not deducing Agile to simply "saving money" or "making things quicker", brings me back to about 10 years ago when we rolled out Lean Six Sigma and tried to apply it in our company. We saw also other peer service companies do the same thing.

In the beginning it created a lot of interest; a lean six sigma web portal was created to share the benefits lean brings to our various locations around the world. Unfortunately though, the system "forces" the operations managers to put a dollar value for all the initiatives - like for a simple FFS (Friday Five-S) initiative, we had to put how much money was saved. This number obviously is not always real, most are imaginary because you cannot accurately quantify intangible benefits or opportunity costs. All this became too cumbersome and repetitive so that towards the end of the campaign (2 years), the content of the portal were mostly our maintenance team making shadow tool boxes, painting their floors, 5S initiatives and maybe one or two touch-time tracking on equipment maintenance. All the above are no longer existent in our company, or at least not in the magnitude it was 10 years ago.

I still though, think there is definitely value in quantifying benefits in terms of the dollar amount, especially to appease the top management ultimately the shareholders. However the perfecting of workflows, the morale of the people (after changes in the workflow), comfort of working in a cleaner and more organized environment - although not always can be quantified by a big dollar value; these certainly affect the way the team performs as a whole.