The other day I hopped on a video call with the various heads-of capabilities we have at work. Your heads of cloud, data, delivery – those sorts of things.
I work in the marketing team, and this was a call about how we sell ourselves in what we do. What makes us different. It's exactly the sort of thing marketing teams like to talk about.
One of the things we talk about a lot is being agile. It was before I got there, but we have a book about building agile teams. Side note: it's very engineery – one thing I spent a fair bit of time on in 2022 was editing a more multi-disciplinary (or, rather, non-disciplinary) second edition, which I'll probably talk more about at some point.
Anyway – agile's something we talk a lot about, and with good reason. We work in agile ways, and it's probably the main thing that sets us apart – not from other smaller agencies that also do agile really well, but from the big IT monoliths that build big, crap, expensive things that cost gajillions of pounds and take so long to deliver they're obsolete from day 1. And probably lock you into a decades-long contract to “maintain” (which probably means, at most, keeping most of the lights on). And which no one understands how they work – even the supplier.
(The bit that sets us apart, historically, from other smaller agencies is probably the strength of the big software engineering bit here, but there are some interesting irons in the fire.)
So agile comes up and I see eyes rolling. That's interesting, I think. Why's that happening? And the reason is that, apparently, clients are becoming jaded about the word agile. Everyone says they're agile, but not everyone means it. Maybe we should say lean instead, someone suggests. But the problem there is people are starting to feel the same way about that word. Dejected nodding. The resignation wasn't about doing agile, you understand – just the value of talking about it.
But hang on: are we accepting the premise that it's OK to say you're agile and not be? Or should we hold people to account? Or at least encourage our public sector clients to? And say we can step in and help when it's needed.
Because I'm prepared to accept that most companies – even some of the biggest ones – aren't perpetrating a deliberate deception. I think it's more likely, in most cases, that they just don't know what they're talking about. I've heard tell of organisations (though this was a local authority, to be fair) use agile to mean hot-desking. And I'm betting it's quite often used vaguely, or aspirationally. “We work hard. Sounds right.”
True, agile can encompass lots of different things and different ways of working. But it has an irreducible core of solving a small problem at a time with small pieces of work that make a meaningful difference quickly. If that's not happening, it's not agile. And if that's not happening, the people that say they do agile but don't should be given help to see the error of their ways. And, if that doesn't do the trick, not given contract extensions or new wins.
The other bit here is that, and of course I'd say this, words matter. And is varied as the details of agile can look, the word itself is too valuable in describing that core of “early and continuous delivery”, as the agile principles have it.
Because if we let agile go, lean will go the same way. And so will whatever we say after that – waffer-thin, maybe. And then we're nowhere, because none of the words we say anyway may as well meaning anything. Which is probably how meaningless business-speak got to be a thing in the first place, now that I think about it.
So for my part: no. I'm going to keep saying agile. And saying that we mean it seriously. And, wherever possible, showing that we mean it by showing that we do it. Though as I said the other day, this is much harder than I'd like it to be at a consultancy that works with the public sector.
Anyway – there. A hastily-written ramble about agile. Because the internet sorely needed another one of those.
#notes #agile