With a new set of Agile principles to take Agile forward over the next 20 years, Agile 2 is applicable beyond software and hardware to all parts of an agile organization including "Agile HR", "Agile Finance", and so on.

Agile 2: The Next Iteration of Agile

Preface

At a developer conference in 2015, Dave Thomas, one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, gave a talk titled “Agile Is Dead.” 1 In a 2018 blog post, Ron Jeffries, another Agile Manifesto author, wrote, “Developers should abandon Agile.” 2 In a 2019 article in Forbes titled “The End of Agile,” tech author Kurt Cagle wrote, “[Agile] had become a religion.” 3 A post about the article 4 in the programmer forum Slashdot received more than 200 comments from software developers, asserting things like “Agile does not always scale well” and “The definitions of ‘agile’ allow for cargo cult implementations.”

How Did We Get Here?

The first thing that the Agile 2 team did was discuss the state of Agile today; in other words, we conducted a kind of retrospective. We are a global team of 15, spanning time zones from California to Vietnam, so we could not assemble in person or even remotely at the same time. We had to find another way. We had one-on-one discussions, which were documented and shared in written form, and then we collaborated to develop a set of “key ideas,” which were ideas expressed by at least two Agile 2 team members. Many of these key ideas were problems with the state of Agile. Others were insights: realizations about why something did not work or what is needed to make things work better.

Specific Problems

If an organization has good leadership, everything else will follow. If an organization has bad leadership, no methodology or set of rules will save you.

Leadership: The Core Issue

As explained in the preface, the purpose of this book is not to serve as a textbook. We therefore will not provide an exhaustive explanation of all of Agile 2's principles.

Ingredients That Are Needed

The common aspects of management that academics usually cite are planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. 1 Leading is sometimes split into directing and coordinating, because using the term leading is—not intending to make a pun—misleading since one can provide leadership about any of these things. For example, one can provide leadership with regard to organizing or planning.

Kinds of Leadership Needed

Agile reminded us that handing someone a document or a spec is not the most effective way to collaborate or share information.

What Effective Collaboration Looks Like

Gene Kim is widely viewed as a spokesperson for DevOps. (DevOps is a set of ideas pertaining to delivering software rapidly at scale.) His 2013 book The Phoenix Project catapulted DevOps into the awareness of the wider IT community. He has also defined what he believes are the core principles of DevOps. He calls these the “Three Ways [of DevOps]”. 1 On the first “way” he writes,

It's All About the Product

There are a great many ideas and practices in the community of product design, worthy of many books. This chapter is not about product design. This chapter is about Agile 2 ideas that might help in defining one's approach to product design and how product vision, design, and implementation might best link together, from an Agile 2 perspective.

Product Design and Agile 2

Have you ever noticed how Agile squirrels are? They can leap between branches that are up to 10 feet apart, 1 and they can scurry along the side of a brick building, their tiny claws grasping the edges of the bricks with lightning speed. Their speed enables them to make millisecond decisions, changing their grasp as needed to keep their hold or changing their direction if a tree branch proves unexpectedly unstable—all in time intervals so short that humans cannot track it.

Moving Fast Requires Real-Time Risk Management

Transformation is the new normal. Today, organizations are in a perpetual state of change. We explained in Chapter 3 that the view that an organization exists in a steady state is obsolete and that, today, change is never-ending.

A Transformation Is a Journey

Just as different Agile experts will describe Agile differently, different DevOps experts will describe DevOps differently—often very differently. This creates a dilemma in which executives want to issue a directive such as “use DevOps.” Such a directive is entirely unclear.

DevOps and Agile 2

When people say that Agile must work “at scale,” what they mean is that it must work when applying it for many teams at once, to build or achieve “big things.”

Agile 2 at Scale

Today's products are often a combination of hardware and software. A car contains millions of lines of software code, as well as thousands of mechanical parts. An iPhone or Android phone contains an extremely complex operating system, but also a myriad of extremely carefully engineered parts. There is a lot of software in the world, but while many products today are exclusively software, most modern products are not software; they are physical objects that contain parts and often “embedded” software as well.

System Engineering and Agile 2

Agile 2 ideas are not just for technology products. The whole point of Agile 2 is to help humans work together to accomplish things—all kinds of things! Indeed, we have seen people use Agile ideas and techniques for planning chores around the house, for improving surgical procedures, and for building construction. Pretty much any human endeavor involving more than one person can potentially benefit from looking at it with Agile 2 ideas in mind.

Agile 2 in Service Domains

Agile 2 brings many additional ideas into the fold of Agile. These ideas are often used by those who practice Agile well, but they have not been part of Agile per se—yet they need to be, because Agile cannot work well without them.

Conclusion

A Accelerate (Humble), 34, 246–247, 383 Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) approach, 138 accountability DevOps and, 282–283 leadership and, 147–150 relationship building and, 148–149 as a trait of inside people, 152 achievement-oriented leader, 52–53 action stage, in TTM, 253 Agile coach role, 8–9 Agile doubters, 9, 162 Agile industrial complex, 6, 106 Agile Manifesto, 3–15, 29 Agile PeopleOps Framework (APF) about, 364–365 Agile 2 in, 363–381 balancing short- and long-term views, 377–378 defining target cultures, 364–372 designing effective work environments, 378–379 dysfunction of staffing functions, 373–377 performance assessments, 380–381 varying processes, 372–373 Agile story, 160–161, 283 Agile team room, 167, 379 Agile thinking, 181 Agile/Agile 2. See also specific topics about, 18–19 business of, 7–11 data, 295–296 DevOps and, 275–296 history of, 1 problems with, 21–46 product design and, 191–203 rise of, 5–6 at scale, 122, 299–333 senior leadership in, 250 in service domains, 363–381 system engineering and, 335–360 agility achieving, 209 defined, 206 as a driver, 99 Alias, 191, 202 alignment, 150, 289 Amazon, 27, 28, 31, 182, 184, 198, 267, 278, 343, 344, 346 Amazon Web Services (AWS), 28, 278 Ambler, Scott, 32 Amin, Nirali, 173 Apache Spark, 332 Apple, 27, 28, 31, 59–60, 192, 304 applicability, of leadership, 59–60 articulation, as a trait of thought leaders, 154 assembly line, 336 AT&T, 192 authority, need for, 50–52 Autodesk, 191 autonomous vehicles, 193 autonomy, 74–75, 83, 232–234 Axios, 166 

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