Being agile is more important than just doing agile as it’s not just about following the tools, practices or some methodology. It’s about the way of thinking, the mindset towards agility based on the values and principles of agile.
We’ve to understand the core principles of agile to be agile and here is the summary:
Welcome changes
Deliver business value
Continuous delivery
Continuous feedback
Continuous improvement
Learn from experience
This is again, not about following some pre-defined set of practices to achieve them. Being agile is possible only when we have the agile mindset to guide the approach we are taking and to decide its effectiveness.
I do remember some working environments where the team used to say that we are agile and used to follow some pre-defined set of practices without having the agile mindset. Whenever a client came in with some changes, they used to say NO as it would impact the work and never thought of small increment to deliver the value. Here, the team used the practices as a measure of effectiveness and not the values and principles of agile.
Thus, having a very good understanding of agile principles opens up the path for being agile and helps us to determine their use. This is the only effective way that helps us deciding the best selection of agile practices.
Being said so, it’s not that easy to change the mindset while working in an organization. Everybody will have their own level of understanding about agile values. There may be several factors which might block people from being agile like fear, trust, willingness to change etc.
Mindset in an organization
To step forward on changing agile mindset in an organization, we can do the following:
Understand
Practice
Encourage
Understanding the agile values and principles will ensure the confidence in individuals. Once individuals have a good understanding on agile mindset, we can take it further.
Now, practicing the understanding or the knowledge that we’ve will sharpen the implementation knowledge. For instance, practicing the welcoming of the change, continuous delivery of business value, continuous feedback to improve etc will help us gaining the confidence to teach others and change the organization towards agility.
Finally, we can encourage others to be agile by sharing the knowledge and experience we’ve had from the understanding and practice. This might be frustrating sometimes as there may arise a lot of questions. I’ve also faced so many questions like Agile is about too much talk and less work, Team always sits to discuss rather than working from their desk etc. This is the reason why, we need a clear understanding and implementation knowledge to answer those sort of questions to empower others being agile.
