Agile and Beyond…
Introduction: This post gives us a view of what is the future of the agile methodology. It is a thought based on my experience, would be happy if this genuinely helped someone in thinking in this direction.
We had discussed on the Agile Team earlier, we had some discussion on possible means that will help us in building a cross skilled self-motivated team. what next…
What is after Agile, an interesting topic to think on, we had a waterfall approach, then came hybrid (waterfall + Agile), then a pure agile approach. Organizations are striving hard to reach this agile culture but is it going to stop there. My thoughts are that Agile is not the end, its just the beginning of what we can say customer-centric approaches. There are also many talks stating Agile is not an efficient one for all organizations, the world is full of perceptions.
My Thoughts…
There would be more business-centric team members in an agile team, members with domain and business knowledge, what matters is the quality and not the quantity. The team would focus on even smaller increments with more business collaboration, this can increase the cycle time but not the quality
There can be a separate team to handle changes, this can be very well confused with change management in the Waterfall world, to visualize in a better manner. Consider a unit that delivers a product that would be used by e-commerce websites.there can be two teams one team that focuses on creating new functionality and one to maintain the existing one
In the current scenario, the maintenance teams and new development teams are per the application, this can get leaned n the future whereby there is one single team with expertise from each application area to handle changes, all changes to the existing application should go through them, they can follow a kanban mode of working
We need to rethink Constraints and have a process to tackle them, many at times Agile Team delivery is dependent on factors external to the development for example Audits, approvals sign off, etc… There should be an executive in every team who handles all this so that team can focus on developing the product, this is one of very practical scenario that can cause schedule slippage
The Leader who leads this team should be thought of as a participant, who also participates motivates and who is not a bureaucrat, this is another common phenomenon, people who organization chose as a leader tend to induce some bureaucracy n the team as demanding the status when will you complete the task, this should be converted to coffee room meets wherein we just discuss on what can be improved, this will make every person in the team to speak up.
Minimum tracking as possible, tracking… one common term followed by everybody who wants to be a leader, in my thought actual leader never has a tracker he is lazy forgetful and never on time, sounds weird but that is my opinion. Trackers are like a virus I would say with questions the very purpose of an agile principle which states, crisp documentation. I am not saying trackers should never exist, they are fine if the situation demands but should be optimized.
Agile has a long way to go we have just started the journey, there are many areas of improvement but we need to start thinking.
Relax.. we are at the end if you are reading this line you have a special virtue called patience, thank you for making it to the end :-)
See you until Next Time….
