Agile focus on flexibility and the ability to change directions during the project, but it is not the same as working unplanned and rushing to do anything that comes up. For some people new to agile methodologies, this might be a bit of a surprise.
An experienced project manager, that at the time was new to agile processes once said to me:
I thought scrum was supposed to be agile, but the fixed sprints makes it a loss less flexible than what I’m used to. When something new, urgent comes up, I can no longer go ask someone on the team to fix it.
At the time, I was mostly upset with the comment, but with some spacetime distance to the project I can now look back and learn something from it.
The first thing that was obvious was that the project manager was not at all as used to plans and following plans as he thought. Of course there had been project plans before, but only on a high level. There had not been the detailed plans that are prepared in a scrum sprint planning meeting, where the team and the product owner negotiates a deal on what to commit to for the next sprint.
The second conclusion is that the project manager was not used to self organizing teams, that do their own planning. In an agile project, the role of the project manager and product owner is to give the team a clear goal and then let the team work in the best way they see fit to reach that goal. To do that, plans are indeed required, but that’s a different kind of plans than the normal project plan.
With scrum practices getting the development team’s work under control and out of an ad hoc process, the problem is often just moved to the product owner. From a developer’s perspective that’s good, because it makes it clear to everybody what the product owner’s responsibilities are.
Introducing scrum practices to a development team is always valuable and improves the development process, even if the project as a whole isn’t agile. For a project to be truly agile it needs to be agile all the way. It needs to be agile before it’s even a project, when it’s first planned. The project governance and project management must be agile. The development team of course needs to be agile. Last but not least, the requirements handling and interactions with stake holders and users must be agile. Unless everybody involved are following the agile principles, the project is not agile.
Nevertheless, a development team will benefit from adopting scrum practices and making an offer to the rest of the project to become agile. In non-agile projects, the developers are run (over) by management rather than being allowed to self organize. When (and I mean when, not if) bad requirements or impossible deadlines are presented to the team, they are pushed onto the team. With bad requirements and impossible deadlines, it doesn’t matter if the team are doing wonders – they will still fail. When they fail it will be their fault. Do you recognize the situation? As a developer, I certainly do.
