How do you know when you are agile?
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If you’re not familiar with agile, it’s basically a set of practices to help teams innovate. Done right, it’s a workhorse for applied innovation, something every corporation wants. The messy part is that if you talk to someone on an actual team at a corporation about the company’s practice of agile, odds are good you’ll hear a lot of grumbling. And not without good reason!
How Do You Know When You’re Agile?
Across my experience as a founder, a manager, an adviser, an investor and a faculty member, I’ve seen agile practiced a lot of different ways. On one end of the spectrum, you’ll find folks who tell you the important thing is the principles. These principles are encapsulated in the Agile Manifesto, the core of which is only 68 words long. This isn’t wrong, but it’s not very actionable.
On the other end of the spectrum, you’ll find folks that have a very formal, relatively rigid practice of agile, usually prescribed by one of two frameworks: Scrum or SAFe. These “agile in a box” frameworks are highly actionable but not always valuable or relevant to the needs of a particular team.
Most of the high-functioning teams I’ve met get to a strong practice of agile by following three steps:
[This article has been reproduced with permission from University Of Virginia's Darden School Of Business. This piece originally appeared on Darden Ideas to Action.]