Agile enthusiast or agile utopian?
Are you an enthusiast or a utopian?

An enthusiast learns by experience, they are positive and believe in the possibility of achieving goals and improving things within the given framework. A utopian can be skeptic regarding the current state of play and is always looking for new solutions, believing it is possible to achieve an ideal society based on a completely new perfect system.

In my job, I was told many times that I am an agile enthusiast, especially in the past few years while working on projects where an agile approach was challenging to implement, leaving little room to be yet even enthusiastic about it.

Where does my enthusiasm towards agile come from? I will try to explain it using a simple example.

Imagine working for a soft drink manufacturer who wants to integrate a recognizable car in their holiday campaign based on the best-known global soft drinks company and their red truck.

If I would give you the task to draw this vehicle, providing even a solid set of instructions, it is quite likely that you would ask at least a few more specific questions, assuming you want to draw the vehicle as truthful to the idea as possible. However, even after having your questions answered, it is highly likely that your drawing would not exactly depict the vehicle that I had in mind.

Rigidity and understanding

I want to avoid criticizing any methodology, but the example above shows the importance of continuous participation in the development process and what a possible outcome could look like when working with such a framework. No matter how many questions one asks, it is hard to truly understand someone else’s requirements, and without additional and ongoing corrections, defining requirements and delivering the final product would be a process probably doomed to fail. The numerous projects that were never finished or finished unsuccessfully give reason for change and higher agility.

Agility does not depend on tools but rather on flexibility, collaboration and fast iterations. The approach is based on continuous human contact and understanding the basic values and principles.

One of the fundamentals of agility is based on the questions what and how, which when answered, give us more clarity and a better understanding. It automatically leads to a higher-quality end result. Through collaboration and frequent checks/adjustments, we minimize the risk of failure, i.e., we provide the biggest value based on the given parameters.

And even in a system like this, the thought of utopianism within the agile framework can be misleading. An agile utopian needs to let go of the rigidity of their approach and lean towards principles and values that are not limiting and restraining.