You don’t do agile?

I once struck up a conversation with someone during one of my trips where I told them that there wasn’t a prescriptive way of organising work at the company I was working on at the time. We were not dogmatic in using kanban, scrum, lean or waterfall, we used whatever worked best for the problem at hand, many times resulting in a mix of these approaches, and even changing them mid-project.

Leads and people in the ground were trusted to take ownership and organize accordingly.

My interlocutor, with a disdained grin said “You do that? You don’t do agile?”. One could almost hear the “pff, ridiculous” undertone.

Process should not be a dogma

I still stand by it. You should not be dogmatic about it in scenarios where the problems keep changing and there is a constant need to adapt. At some point, all companies need to adapt to overcome competition, changing consumer behaviours, regulations, etc. The only thing that really changes between companies is how much time it takes for that change cycle to happen.

It is sensible to have a stable and institutionalised process across a company, when these cycles are long and harmony between people and departments is valued highly, but that same approach in a fast changing environment will the company’s death kneel, crumbling under its own comfortable rigidness.

Overall, the world is moving faster and faster, specially with the ongoing revolution of AI that is slowly creeping through many branches of our society, and the increasing amount of people entering the labor market.

An example

On one of the latest projects I was involved in, where requirements would change very rapidly, and product market fit was crucial to first understand, having bulky processes would have done more harm than good. What actually worked was:

• Having a simple tracker
• Small team
• (Almost) every day in the morning having a talk async or sync (via call or in the office), where each one of the team members mentioned what they were going to focus during the day, and de-dup where required
• Once product market fit was established and the product matured, iterations started being mostly incremental, and we started adding processes wherever controlled chaos was not being productive, this is, wherever things started to break and harm the project’s objectives. No process was added for the sake of adding it and make it sound professional

Silver bullets

To this day I cringe when thinking about that conversation.

There is not a silver bullet. Processes are like tools. You should use the right one for the right job, combining them when necessary. You wouldn’t use a jackhammer to drive a simple nail.

Don’t be a process zealot. Use it as a means to an objective.