Agilists are the new Wine Snobs

I’ve been listening to the History of Wine by Hugh Johnson and a thought occurred to me that just like wine snobs who scoff at someone who says their favorite wine is White Zinfandel, Agilists do the same thing when someone mentions project management, which apparently is akin to liking White Zinfandel.

Agilists are the new wine snobs.

I think one of the key challenges with agile in general is that we don’t want to be associated with projects, instead wanting to work in short increments to deliver value. The problem with this is that business doesn’t really work like this. When I have an idea for improving my business, typically this is associated with two things — The idea or outcome and when I’d like to see that outcome deliver results.

Now if I’m a businessperson listening to a project manager, I hear them tell me that they will develop a business requirements document to capture in more detail my idea, and then they will work to generate a technical design document to tell me how my idea will be realized and then finally they will tell me how much my idea will take to deliver it. They will then take all of this and turn it into a project plan telling when I should expect this new idea to be delivered. I like this approach because I have other things I need to do, run the business, engage with other operational parts of the business, meet with my customers, and generate more new ideas. Simply having a project manager run things while I’m working on other stuff makes my day easier.

At the end of the project, I will sit down to see my idea working and I realize that what I thought I was getting doesn’t seem to be what I am getting, but it was too late so I must approve it and hope that my next new idea will work out better.

Now if I’m that same businessperson listening to a Product Owner or Scrum Master, I hear them tell me that they will work to create a minimum via product for my idea and that they will have me check in with them every two weeks to see a demo of the idea. The problem is that I have all of this other stuff I need to do so I can’t really commit to meeting with the Product Owner and team on a regular basis, so they continue working on the MVP and move on to the next phases of the new idea that we had discussed at the beginning of the Feature or Epic or Initiative, whatever they called then.

At the end of the thing they are doing, I will sit down to see my idea working and I realize that what I thought I was getting doesn’t seem to be what I am getting, but it was too late so I must approve it as is and hope that my next new idea will work out better.

Notice the outcome of both processes, which results in the same outcome, and we see this time and again in supposedly agile organizations. The root cause of course is a lack of engagement by the very people (business) who will benefit most from an agile way of working.

If you are moving to an Agile delivery model, several aspects of how you run your business must change, they are:

1. Increased engagement from business and leadership — There is no getting around this aspect of agility. To ensure we are building what you envisioned, we must have a consistent engagement to show you how we have interpreted your idea. I guarantee you that in almost every case, what you thought you wanted and were clear about, will absolutely turn into something different once your team of people starts the process of designing and developing your idea. And there is nothing more demoralizing than working so hard on something only to be told you completely missed the mark.

2. Fund teams but focus on value. Your new idea needs to be aligned with value and those value outcomes need to be very clear. Your idea needs to be associated with committed outcomes. This is the only way to ensure that you are adding value to the company by developing a feature factory mentality that celebrates output over outcomes. It is an absolute guarantee that you spend way more on your ideas than you should.

3. Change your project management mindset. Agile features project management, we still need to organize our work and ensure that we are delivering what we commit to from a sprint perspective. Agile is a much more disciplined way of delivering software and features much higher levels of transparency about how everything is progressing. But to benefit from that transparency you need to be engaged, if not you are simply delivering a project in 2-week increments.

So, if you have been someone who only liked White Zinfandel, know that though you may enjoy it you are also missing out on other great experiences by not changing your mindset about what will work with your likes and dislikes. Open your mind to change, be willing to engage in new ways of working but always look to move forward.