Let's be Fwends #142:

If it's working, it helps

Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.

~ Coco Chanel

Hey there and welcome to edition 142 of Let's be Fwends! This week, I'd like to share my view on the "Agile is dead" thing that is going on right now. Is 'Agile' dead? And if so, who killed it? And what's next?

Pragmatic Agility

I believe in organisational agility. I think Scrum is an interesting way to achieve it. I like Scrum. I practice Scrum. I defend Scrum on a regular basis. But I never thought of it as a panacea, a cure for all ailments you, your team, or your organisation might suffer from.

It's a tool. Nothing more. Useful? Maybe. That depends on your context.

I'm not limiting myself to Scrum, or framework-thinking in general. I helped teams implement workflows and processes that have nothing to do with Scrum or Agile (with a capital 'A'), but which were still useful, provided value for the team and helped them move forward to their own version of being agile.

For some teams, that was a Kanban workflow and Work In Progress limits. For others, it was a Value Stream Mapping exercise.

Over the last years, I developed something like a framework-agnostic approach to agility. You could call it Pragmatic Agility.

If you will, I applied the first and foremost rule of product work to my own work:

Deliver something that is useful and creates value for your audience.

Dogma usually doesn't help. Applying concepts to their specific contexts do.

That's it for this edition of Let's be Fwends. I swear I tried to find a couple of interesting links to add, but somehow the Internet is a bit devoid of interesting. So I just added my own. 😴🤔