We have now covered six principles -
They are built around small, self-organising teams

The team has a clear vision of what they are doing and where they fit into the bigger picture
The team has a well defined backlog of work
There is a content authority responsible for making sure decisions are made quickly
There is a clear bidirectional service agreement between the team and the rest of the organisation
There is a fast feedback loop that allows the team and organisation to optimise both the process and the product.

At this point we have everything we need to enable a team to operate in a really agile way. The team doesn't need anything else. So why are there seven principles?

AgilityDave Martin4 October 2016principlesComment

Principles Part 4 - Feedback Loops

So, where are we now? Over the last few weeks we have looked at the first 5 of my agile principles -

They are built around small, self organising teams
The team has a clear vision of what they are doing and where they fit into the bigger picture
The team has a well defined backlog of work
There is a content authority responsible for making sure decisions are made quickly
There is a clear bidirectional service agreement between the team and the rest of the organisation

We have a pretty good setup going now - we have an efficient delivery engine (the team), a destination (the vision), a route (the backlog), a navigator (the content authority) and last time we added a clear service agreement, so the team and organisation know what's expected of each other. With this sort of structure they can really start to get things done. But there is still one more thing to add to make the team really high performing - the ability to improve.

AgilityDave Martin20 September 2016principles, feedbackComment

Principles Part 3 - Service Agreement

When we left our hypothetical team last post, they had the first 4 of my principles applied -

They are built around small, self-organising teams
The team has a clear vision of what they are doing and where they fit into the bigger picture
The team has a well defined backlog of work
There is a content authority responsible for making sure decisions are made quickly

They have their powerful delivery engine (the team), they have their destination in mind (the vision), they have their route planned (the backlog) and they have someone looking head and changing the route (and even the destination) if things change (the content authority). Is that all they need?

AgilityDave Martin6 September 2016principlesComment

Principles Part 2 - Content Authority

Last post we looked at the first three of my agile principles -

They are built around small, self-organising teams
The team has a clear vision of what they are doing and where they fit into the bigger picture
The team delivers a regular flow of value via a well-defined backlog of work

This gives us an effective delivery engine (the team) with a clear destination in mind (the vision) and a clear route to get there (the backlog). All good? Not quite. If nothing was ever going to change, this would be all we need, but we know this isn't the case. When doing development work, and no matter what it is we are developing, we generally aren't travelling on well marked highways. Most development is, at best, navigating though a confusing maze of back streets and at worst, blazing our own trail through virgin country of varying degrees of ruggedness.

AgilityDave Martin16 August 2016principlesComment

Principles Part 1 - Teams, Visions and Values

Last post I put forward 7 principles that I think every agile methodology should have. In this post, I'll be explaining (hopefully) what each of those principles means and why I think it is important. To recap, the six principles for a successful methodology are -

They are built around small, self-organising teams
The team has a clear vision of what they are doing and where they fit into the bigger picture
The team delivers a regular flow of value via a well defined backlog of work
There is a content authority responsible for making sure decisions are made quickly
There is a clear bidirectional service agreement between the team and the rest of the organisation
There is a fast feedback loop that allows the team and organisation to optimise both the process and the product.
The methodology is self-similar at scale.

So, let's start looking at these in more detail.

AgilityDave Martin2 August 2016principles, vision, purposeComment

Agile First Principles

Recently I put out a post calling for the agile community to stop focusing so much on executing methodologies and return to a principles based approach. To stop doing scrum, or SAFe or Less or whatever and start being agile. That has generated a small amount of comment, mostly people asking me what I mean by a principles based approach and what I think those principles are. Here is my attempt to explain both.

To illustrate what I mean by a principles based approach, I will continue with the analogy of cooking because it's my other favourite activity and because it seemed to strike a chord with those that read my last post on this. There are, as I said before (and to massively generalise), two types of cook, those that follow recipes and those that don't. Recipe following cooks can be great cooks but if they want their chocolate cake to be a little more chocolatey, they need to look for a new recipe. They can't adjust it themselves. Cooks that don't use recipes tend to work from a set of fundamental principles - this flavour goes well with that flavour, adding extra dry ingredients means you need to add extra wet ingredients, bacon makes everything taste better, and so on. So when they want a more chocolatey chocolate cake, they can adjust (add more cocoa and some extra milk to balance). When the cake collapses coming out of the oven, they can diagnose why and adjust so it works next time. When they have a recipe for chocolate cake but don't have any chocolate they can improvise a vanilla cake from the same recipe.

AgilityDave Martin19 July 2016principlesComment