Agile is dead.  Not the way your goldfish dies as a kid.  “Agile” is dead the way Marxism (as a socioeconomic political stance) is dead.  The dilution of the meaning of the word through excessive use, improper use, and deconstructionism, has made it not-worth-speaking-about.

Pragmatically speaking, there are really two ways people killed “agile”:

1. As part of a movement, several institutions adopted the language of agile without changing their structure, values, or goals.  This made it necessary to explain your use of the word agile.
2. Many of the practices that made “agile” marketable have become the normal way of developing software due to market demands, even in companies that expressly claim they will never practice “agile”

That latter disconnect is why you’ll see I’ll still write about things that sound like “agile” as a noun, the kind consultants charge money.  I’m going to be more specific about how innovate new products, encourage logic in product management decisions, and help you not destroy the team that makes you successful.  As dave Dave Thomas, one of the original authors of the agile manifesto said:

Agile is not a noun, it’s an adjective, and it must qualify something else. “Do Agile Right” is like saying “Do Orange Right.”

Having built my career around agile and scrum, the dread I began to feel roughly six months ago when someone started talking to me about agile in software development was meta-disheartening. 

Now, instead, I’m beginning to see that getting very specific about what I would improve in a company’s strategic planning, management tactics, and organizational psychology is extremely important.  After all, when was the last time that you used “agile” the noun-and-buzz-word-for-sale in the same way you used “agile” the adjective?

ag·ile

adjective

1.able to move quickly and easily.

“Ruth was as agile as a cheetah”

synonyms: nimble, lithe, supple, limber, acrobatic, fleet-footed, light-footed, light on one’s feet

Does that sound like your company?  Does it sound like your software team?  Product strategy?   Only if you are small, most likely.

If you work at a very large company, I have a hard truth for you.  The nimbleness of a body with extreme mass is internal. In a startup, you cancel a feature when it has a detrimental impact on a key metric.  Choosing one feature over another in a new product can pivot you into an entirely new competitive landscape, target market, and revenue stream.  In a very large company, you cancel the entire project.  You lay off an entire division.  You sell off everything tangible about the business process that are no longer part of your corporate strategy.

Remember how I said Marxism is dead?  Do you hear much about communism as a US social movement?  What about socialism?  Probably not.  Instead, in the ongoing internal dialogue of the USA superorganism, opposers and supporters alike rallied their opinions and held debates and made decisions using the words from the movement until the original words no longer accurately described the problem at hand.  Now socialism is part of our capitalism and capitalism is part of our socialism.  The only people who really care about the words as they were originally meaningful are the people either using them as a weapon or avoiding them out of fear of it hurting their reputation.

So when I stop fighting for “agile” don’t worry, my core values didn’t change.  I’m just targeting the problems more specifically, empathizing more with the people affected, and resolving their pain directly rather than fighting for revolution.

Here are a few things to do right now that will make your company better:

1. Plan your business decisions (project-based investments) in smaller increments.
2. Decompose development tasks so that they are less than a week of coding.
3. Require continuous code integration (and pull-before-you-push, etc).
4. Empathize more with users, and show your early adopters your work-in-progress.
5. Ensure division of labor – “specialization” – isn’t leading to alienation.

Photo via davide ragusa