Isn’t Agile just for Software Developers?

That’s a great question. The simple answer is no, it’s not. It’s just that software development is where Agile was born. It’s grown up, matured, and expanded its wings since then.

Agile is for everyone and everything. Agile is a mindset, a way to think through a project, be responsive and productive, and do it with good teamwork. Agile is not a kanban board, a sprint, or a PI-planning session. Those are tools that Agile can use for a project, but they aren’t required, and they aren’t applicable all the time.

There are other very successful project management tools out there that can be responsive, productive, and have fantastic teams. The reason we use Agile is because our teams are more responsive, more productive, and the teams feel more connected and find their flow together more often.

You might think Agile is just for software developers because of where it began. Agile started back in the early 2000s when a group of software developers got together to address the inefficiencies they were stumbling over with traditional project management.

Over the previous decade before they met, software development was in its infancy and these developers realized that there was a better way to do their work. The older processes, which had roots in the Industrial Revolution, didn’t apply anymore. Since they weren’t in that factory-like environment anymore, these software developers came together and wrote down some of the new best practices they had identified for their work.

The result was the Agile Manifesto. This is a document and declaration that emphasizes a flexible, collaborative, and customer-centric approach to working – specifically working on software development at the time. But it is applicable to other types of work as well. The manifesto itself is succinct and promotes four core values with 12 underlying Principles. Here are the four core values:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

These values form the foundation of agile methodologies, which many of you have seen, read, and worked with before. These ideas are common sense ideas. Any idea or project that people are working on can – and do – use these values and principles as guidelines.

Think about it. If you look at these values, they make sense.

• You want to prioritize the people you are working with vs. being dead set on the process
• You want to have a project that works vs. pages and pages of paperwork
• You want to be working together vs. fighting to win
• You want to be flexible to today’s reality vs. having a black-and-white adherence to a plan

Agile doesn’t say that processes, documentation, negotiation, or plans are bad. They aren’t bad AND they are all used in Agile! These values aren’t picking one OR the other, they are both/and, just with a prioritization of the items.

In our next post, we’ll walk through the list of Agile Principles with some explanations of how these are universal, common-sense ideas. Over the next few months, we’ll be digging into these principles in more detail and sharing some examples of how Agile works with practical steps you can use and put in your workflow as well.

Agile is a fantastic tool and sometimes gets a bad rap. But here at Snowbird Agility, we know it’s a flexible and fluid mindset, not just a to-do list to work through. Because of that, agile is baked into everything we do.