I’ve recently stumbled upon two blog posts that got me thinking about agile adoptions and why they might fail (not in a safe way).

First there was this post that I saw because it resonated with a colleague and he shared it.

http://inline-lambda.blogspot.ca/2013/11/agile-b2b-and-beta-conundrum.html

I don’t know Guillaume and I’m sure he is a very nice guy, but the post struck me as from someone who didn’t understand the Agile Manifesto and was confusing it with the prescriptive guidance in the Scrum Guide or the guidance of The Lean Startup.

And then I saw a post from my friend Dylan Smith starting a blog series about “Why Does Agile Fail”.

As I was reading these two posts, I started asking myself Why are these authors making these statements? Why are they observing these effects? The way that I’ve understood the Agile Manifesto and its intent, you shouldn’t see these effects, at least not for very long. It struck me though that this is a story that I hear over and over again.

Then I had a light bulb moment.

We often talk about an “Agile Buffet” as a set of tactics or practices we can pull from and use as best fits within our organization. I like this. As a passionate Kanban Method practitioner, the idea that we’ll continuously discover problems opportunities for improvement and that we’d want to leverage past industrial learning is a core philosophy for me. But the Agile Manifesto is NOT a buffet. We should not pick and choose which of the values and principles that we will follow and aspire to. They are all necessary ways of thinking if we’re going to pull our industry out of the dark ages.

Now I am not suggesting we shouldn’t be finding the best way to, in context, live up to those values and principles. We should be very disciplined in What we pull from the Agile Buffet and When we pull the improvement. This is where a Kanban Method approach to continuous improvement is enormously beneficial. With a functioning kanban system, we have data that allows us to make informed, economically sound decisions about improvements and a mindset that we are going to improve incrementally and in an evolutionary manner. We are actually slaying a software development dragon with a 1-2 punch of Agile Manifesto thinking and Kanban Method thinking. We’ve got something guiding us towards what a successful software development team would behave like (Agile Manifesto) and we’ve got something showing us how to get to that goal in a humane, intelligent, and economic manner (Kanban Method).

Final Thoughts

I would like to encourage you to go read the Agile Manifesto again and to go read about The Kanban Method. They won’t tell you how to do things, but they are telling you what you should aspire to do. Now with that in mind, go and look at the Agile Buffet. Read the Scrum Guide. Read the kanban blue book as well as look at case studies from teams that have used the Kanban Method. This is your buffet of tactics that can help you solve your problems. Start pulling from this buffet of industrial learning. Develop a capability to understand what works for you and perhaps more importantly what doesn’t.

But please remember, these value systems are not a buffet and you don’t get to pick and choose from the values and principles they provide.