What are Agile Principles?

All management gurus univocally argue that for bringing excellence in work place in today’s world one need to bring empowerment, collaboration, learning environment and opportunity to excel to the workforce. Agile development fits very well with 21st century management thinking. Its principles are fully aligned with this knowledge economy needs. They are:

• Customer Focus: Customer is the king in today’s world. Everyone has choices and power to choose. You can never be successful ignoring customer needs, his likings; his feelings need to account for. If you do not do it, someone else will do it. Therefore, it is essential to keep Customer at the nucleus of development cycle. Agile states this one as its first principle.

• Adaptive Planning: Planning is putting a schedule in future. Since it deals with future, longer planning horizon leads to larger inaccuracies in the plan. Agile believes in adaptive planning. You fine tune your plan as you progress. Progress brings better visibility and planning is more realistic.

• Verifiability Driven: The classical development suffered from lack of visibility. The customer did not know till he was shown a product at the time of delivery. Many times the product was not the one which customer needed. Agile believes in verifiability. Customer sees each feature being developed. He sees how it looks like. It helps in bringing out what is the best for the market and what is needed by the customer.

• Avoid wastage: Wastage is the cost. More wastage means high cost of development. When you reject a product at a later stage, it has to be redone. Very often a new design may be needed. It not only derails the schedule but also raises development cost abnormally. Therefore, Agile suggests customer involvement at each stage of development. Customer verifies the development through daily scrum meetings and helps in avoiding wastage of efforts.

• Collaboration: Collaboration is today’s world mantra. We have specialist in each area. They need to collaborate to bring a solid product. Agile brings them together. Agile is based on collaboration amongst different stakeholders like Product Owner, Sales, Designer, and Developer. The different agile ceremonies are the collaboration platforms. They are scrum meeting, sprint planning, sprint review meeting, Retrospective etc. Collaboration amongst the team members is the key in Agile.

• Visibility: CFO is the custodian of the budget and expenses in a company. Product owner needs to ensure that the development is completed on time and under the budget. Change control in classical development used to bring shock to these senior stakeholders. They did not know except through the progress report, how the project was progressing. The Project manager managed the project and often gave surprises. It is therefore necessary to bring visibility at all levels. Agile brings the same through its ceremonies. Customer knows how the project is shaping and what features are being built for next release?

• Technical Excellence: Technology is a complex stuff. It is used to develop a software. Very rarely a large proportion of technology features are exploited. At most if one works independently, one is about to utilize 20-30 % of available features. In the case of agile, collaboration, cross discussion amongst the stake holders helps utilize best out of the technology. Agile brings technical excellence.

Why Agile came into being when life cycle processes like Waterfall, Iterative existed?

Whenever we have problem in delivery we often talk about requirement were not stated clearly. The client starts talking about lack of understanding at the development team. This process goes on and we have unhappy customer. One of the significant reasons for this gap is development mindset and the development methodology. Generally, before advent of Agile, Waterfall was predominantly followed in software product development. The development methodology believed in locking down the requirement and taking care of changes through change control. Locking down requirement appears simplistic at the outset, whereas it is difficult to achieve for the factors stated below.

•In the beginning we have less understanding about the project requirements There is a significant gap in the understanding level of expert and the person who records the requirements leading to gap and erroneous requirement gathering
•Requirement documents run in hundreds of pages. It is difficult to verify accurately
•The customer needs and environment is dynamic. They keep on continuously evolving

Basic belief of freezing requirement is erroneous. Particularly if one is developing the state of the art product, one has to bring in the best features; best technology and both of them keep on evolving. Change control as a means of bringing in changes leads to conflict of interest between the developer and the customer, thus the product suffers.

Contract & Requirement document is used for getting change control approved. The focus shifts from developing the best product to managing the scope and getting maximum for given contract. If I may ask how often you have seen the big four completing project in time? Answer will be rarely. At the same time we praise their capability of managing project. The whole focus shifts to project management and not the product development. In such situation one can never deliver a very good product.

We live in exponential world. Changes are happening continuously. If one wants to develop product in this situation, one has to learn to live with the evolving exponential world and its dynamics. Technology is changing continuously, Industry standards, which helps build software keeps on changing for better Customer has better understanding of needs as they progress on development. Waterfall asked to freeze requirements before we moved to design stage. The poor owner of product had no option and did something under stress. Some thinker realized that this is not good for the evolving environment and wanted to bring agility in the process. Agile was born. Agile may not be answer to all development problems but it matches with the dynamics of today’s world. It fits seamlessly with development needs.

I guess if you ask your kid to freeze his career aspirations and work on it relentlessly, I am afraid he will term it as a criminal action. They want to explore the options, understand it well before committing himself. Waterfall did not address that. It was cruel enough to ask for full commitment before confirming how the product is going to look like. Agile gives a pre-view, it provides flexibility, it gives option to change as you move.

Leading from the Front

Leadership can be defined as one's ability to get others to willingly follow. Some sit and debate whether leaders are made or born. These discussions/debates bring to light the traits of a great leader in front of people. But there cannot be a more powerful way of demonstrating the traits with a live example which was witnessed by a large number of people in the society.

Just about a month back the whole nation was going through a great Euphoria. Everyone wanted to bring the Cricket World Cup back home. There was a lot of excitement, a lot of debate and speculations. Each win for India was difficult. The final with Sri lanka will be remembered for a long time not only by cricket fans but by all. Before the final match two of the heroes in Indian team were Virendra Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar. People expected a lot from them. Sri Lankans played first and put a target of 270 for Indians. The early fall of wicket brought frustration for Indians and excitement for Sri Lankans
Sehwag 1 – 0
Tendulkar 2-31
Kohli 3 – 114

After Tendulkar returned to pavilion, Virat Kohli and Gambhir brought a ray of hope for all the Indians and the Indian team. We all know India has a depth in batting; however we have also witnessed India’s batting collapse while playing under pressure. After the fall of Kohli’s wicket, Yuvraj was the next batsman in line. But what happened will be remembered by all Management analysts for a long time. Dhoni showed up. Dhoni was in a bad form during this tournament. The game was exciting. Dhoini demonstrated confidence. He played with a lot of competence. His game was the best in this tournament. He took charge and led from the Front. This was an excellent example of a great Leader who maintains calmness under crisis, leads from the front, demonstrates confidence, inspires his teammates and plays intelligently. This was a great example for a management reader.

Five qualities of a great leader as described by Kouzes and Posner’s in the book “The Leadership Challenge” are:

Honesty
Forward- looking
Inspiring
Competent
Intelligent

Exhibiting these traits will inspire confidence in your leadership during crisis management. As a leader your skill at exhibiting these five leadership qualities is strongly correlated with people’s desire to follow you as their lead.

Let us go back to the World cup cricket match. Dhoni partnered with Gambhir and took the Indian team out of crisis. He lead from the front while demonstrating the traits of a great Leader. India was 223 for 4 when we lost Gambhir’s wicket. Gambhir played very well but unfortunately could not complete his century. Yuvraj joined Dhoni and once again we were victorious. This was a well deserved victory. The game had a lot of excitement, an exemplary performance by Dhoni. Besides his exemplary performance he demonstrated Exemplary Leadership qualities by Leading from the Front.

Leadership is all about helping others to realize their worth and make them perform at their best. It is also about leading from the front in crisis.

In the Wonderland of Management Culture

At the outset, I would like to wish all my readers a very Happy and Prosperous year 2011. Let the year bring a culture of Performance and Prosperity.

Very often we hear about Management Culture. You might have come across many types of companies. They could be family owned organization, publically owned and professionally managed by a specific National or a Multinational organization. There is a common thread of success across all of them. I have heard many debates in my life. I feel lucky to work with all of them. I’m sharing with you what I have heard in different companies.

Let us take a family managed Organization first. The spirit of Entrepreneurship was buzzing all over the organization. Innovative ideas, new thoughts, execution at lightning speed, urge to implement all techniques, were some of the talk of the town. The Management always tried bench marking itself with the best possible in the world. They thought of best practices and how to exceed the expectation of shareholders. In the process, at times, the human feeling did not get the due weight age. But the organization prospered. A good example could be creation of a mammoth umpire by Mr. L.N. Mittal. I don’t remember having heard even a single time the world “Culture.”

Let us take a professionally managed organization. The organization run on best practices, it had time tested systems, decisions were taken based on well debated process. It had a sound management system. People were heard and Manager decided. Again rarely I heard the world “Culture.” One of the best example in this category could be Tata Steel.

The third category of company is a so called Multinational. The Multinational could be an Indian Multinational or a western managed Multinational. I have heard story of a very mediocre performing company in this category. This was one of the cases where I heard about the world “Culture” every now and then. Possibly the company had poverty of Management and performance and got satisfaction by using the world “Culture” all the time. A group of sycophant Managers aligned and echoed the “Culture” word synchronously. For them creating a niche for themselves at cost of anything was the sole goal. The result “ Non-Performance”. In MNC category we all have read and heard about GE and Jack Welcsh. I have not come across the world “ Culture” many time in Jack Welch book. The Performance under Jack Welch is a known fact now and being referred by management practitioner all over.

Based on the above examples, I think culture of the all organizations can be grouped in two categories namely a Performance Culture & a Non-Performance Culture. There is no classification on the basis of origin and management of the organization or any other factor. It is an amazing experience to be a part of performing organization. If you think you are a part of non-performance, sit down, introspect, and get into a performance focussed oganization. You will learn, enjoy and prosper. Performance brings prosperity and not the so called world “Culture”.