The Agile Truth

The adoption of agile can be a difficult experience, I think some of these difficulties come from a reluctance to accept some of the uncomfortable truths agile is trying to teach.

Traditional methodologies, such as waterfall, are built on a premise that the world is slow moving, we can make long term plans, cover every eventuality and anticipate what our users want.

Agile is built for a new world, one that is moving far to fast for us to have any hope that we can keep up. Once we accept this as reality it becomes clear that we need an effective strategy for dealing with failure and change.

The truth of agile is that we must learn to let go of our pretence of control.

The Plan Won't Come Together

A common un-truth spoken about agile is that it doesn't involve planning, this isn't true. The truth is that agile places limits on how long we can realistically expect our plan to hold together.

We've all worked on long waterfall projects where success is often measured on whether we delivered ahead of schedule or under budget, note how these things are often mutually exclusive and have very little to do with the user.

An agile plan is one designed to have a short shelf life with a new revised incarnation on the horizon that will adapt to changing circumstances, the agile truth is that we can't predict the future or control events.

Be First Not Best

In almost any arena of digital products once a vacuum is identified its very often filled with staggering speed and becomes saturated extremely quickly.

While no-one would suggest it's acceptable to ship rubbish, there is a lot to be said for gaining a foothold in a market early and using the real-world experience you gain from your users to drag yourself up the mountain.

Even if initially your only meeting some minimal need your users have becoming part of there existence gives you much more opportunity to learn than trying to second-guess or calculate what their bigger desires may be.

The agile truth is that you probably only have a partial understanding of what your users want, you don't define that they do and you shouldn't believe what they say you should believe what they do.

Failure is the Only Option

What all this should be adding up to is that failure is inevitable, whether we like it or not change we didn't anticipate is coming.

Our only effective strategy is to attempt to limit the scale of the failure and ensure we draw enough information from it to formulate an effective comeback, its better to be in the real world failing then on the drawing board apparently succeeding.

Once we accept that the agile truth is that we will fail its a logical step that we should want to fail fast, redefine failure as an opportunity to learn and re-cast our users as teachers.

The majority of people who are reluctant to accept agile will cling to rose tinted memories of waterfall where they thought they had control over there destiny.

Sometimes its possible to be failing so slowly its almost imperceptible right up to the crushing realisation that things aren't the way you thought they were.

Waterfall is a very tempting narrative that we would all want to be true, that we are in control and we can shape the world around us. The agile truth is that this is a lie, the only element of control we have is in the short term and that our job is to effectively manage failure so out next iteration moves us two steps forward.