Agility and Adaptability
One of the components of agile mindset is adaptability. In the same manner “responding to change” is one of the four key items in the famous Agile Manifesto. When we were presented with few agile opportunities we simply had to act. As a result, there will be some changes regarding this agile blog.
Agile Opportunities
True opportunities are rare. When they present themselves, you have to act quickly and make good use of them. That’s one of the many reasons why we use iterative software development or iterative approach in general.
After each and every iteration we can change our course to adapt to the ever-changing circumstances. This is not possible in the old project thinking paradigm where you set up goals for years and then work to meet them.
Being agile is a lot about taking every opportunity out there, as long as they are pragmatic. Pragmatism dictates that if the possible gains are smaller than the expected losses then you shouldn’t act. In the same manner, if you can’t possibly win, then playing that game is unwise.
That of course doesn’t mean you should be afraid. All those components of the agile mindset are not contradicting each other. They are complementary. When you play to win and not avoid losing, you’re risking a lot. That’s the agile way. But that still doesn’t mean you should play the game where odds are against you.
It’s not cowardice to abstain from taking unnecessary risks.
Follow The Rules Of Being Flexible
It’s one thing to have the possibility to change your plans. It’s the other to use it.
Apparently, thousands of US teenagers had an idea for Facebook but they were too lazy to follow up on it. Of course, that’s not true but it gives you idea that merely “being agile” doesn’t mean “responding to changes”.
You can’t follow the rule “break all the rules”. Agile methods give you frameworks. You should build your own system on top of the one you’ve chosen. The agile mindset tells you how to do it.
The worst kind of agile project is the one where everything is fixed – scope, schedule, feature set, time, people, etc. It’s the famous “agile in name only” venture. People apparently work in Scrum and they have Sprints, Scrum Masters, Product Owners and even events like Daily Scrum and sometimes even Sprint Planning. But they have zero understanding of why they do what they do.
Following a set of rules won’t make you ready to take advantage of chances. Just because you can reorganize your backlog at any given time, it doesn’t mean that you do it when it’s needed. That’s the sad reality.
However, being able to spot the opportunity is a completely different thing altogether.
Stay Frosty
You can be so focused on your day to day activities and so concerned with your Sprint to Sprint advances that you’ll miss many opportunities. What’s even worse, you miss the big picture.
That’s what happened to us here at Agile Protein few weeks ago. Thankfully, we decided to zoom out and think about our future and to no surprise we realized that we have a great deal of opportunities at hand.
So we started to pursue and validate them. Things that look to good to be true usually turn out to be exactly that – not true. On the other hand, you won’t forgive yourself if you don’t check.
There are two ends of this spectrum. Some people see everything as their chance and they pursue all of them, failing miserably. Others believe that nothing good ever happens to them and don’t even look for opportunities.
As usual, there’s a sweet spot where you don’t ignore chances that are real but you verify instead. Study them quickly and carefully and if they turn out to be legitimate – take them. True chances are fleeting.
Agile Protein Opportunities
We’ve been personally presented with a great opportunity to expand our Scrum and agile training and coaching potential in Poland.
That chance resulted in long talks and deliberations about the direction we want to take with #białko (our Polish brand) and Agile Protein, which we hope will become a global brand in the Agile world.
But you can’t focus on many things at once. Instead of traveling around the world, giving speeches at various conferences in very distant places, we will focus on the Polish market. We’re still going to be active on Twitter but we’re going to write less and less for our English blog.
Why? Because on top of everything else we started to write a book that it’s going to be published in Polish at first. Our writing capabilities are limited and we don’t want to drag all this more than necessary.
So there’s a lot of things going on and writing an English blog ceased to be a priority for us.
But don’t worry, we’re still available to hire if you have any agile needs, be it training, workshops or consulting services.
Contact us if you want to learn more.
