The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER THREE

Choose Your Agility

There’s no point in Agile for the sake of Agile. Instead, ask yourself two questions:

1. Will Agile help us be more successful?

2. What will it take to achieve that success?

When you can answer these questions, you’ll know whether Agile is right for you.

WHAT DO ORGANIZATIONS VALUE?

There’s more to success than revenue. Here’s a partial list:

• Improving financial results: profit, revenue growth, shareholder value, cost savings

• Achieving organizational goals: strategic objectives, original research, charitable causes

• Improving market position: brand projection, competitive differentiation, customer loyalty, attracting new customers

• Gaining understanding: strategic information, analytics, customer feedback

• Reducing risk: security, regulatory requirements, auditing

• Increasing capacity: hiring, retention, morale, skill development, automation

The Agile Fluency Model

In 2014, I partnered with Diana Larsen to analyze why companies see such different results from their Agile teams. We had both worked with Agile teams from the beginning. Over the years, we noticed that they tended to see dramatically different types of results, and those results tended to cluster in different “zones.” We captured these observations in the Agile Fluency Model. A simplified view is shown in Figure 3-1. [Shore2018b]

Figure 3-1. A simplified view of the Agile ...