Agility doesn't make you fast

… but it may make you relevant

I was recently chatting with Chris Gagné, agile coach and (former - Chris has since moved to NZ!) host of the SF Bay Area agile potluck, about the drivers of agile adoption, and how one articulates the benefits of adopting an agile practice to different stakeholders in different types of organisations.

Chris noted that many stakeholders had high expectations of speed, and that while agility can certainly deliver a higher speed of execution due to adoption of good development practices and some extra discipline, true speed benefits are seldom fully realised prior to a broader re-thinking of surrounding structural and cultural contexts.

Like Chris, I’ve noticed stakeholders’ frequent fixation on speed as a ‘key benefit’ of agility, so as a thought experiment, tried to frame a different key benefit.

We flirted briefly with productivity as a candidate. However, while productivity, like speed, will likely improve as a consequence of an agile practice, it still doesn’t strike me as a lens that does agility justice.

One perspective I like is relevance. An agile practice tends to increase the relevance of the work done. Relevance may manifest in the following ways:

• Customer satisfaction: Focusing on short feedback cycles that involve the customer (external or internal) at every step, and on working on the highest value features at all times, helps the customer get what they need sooner. The initiative is unlikely to stray from the customer’s needs in the face of continuous visibility and feedback throughout its lifecycle.
• Quality: Some of the prerequisites for agile software development (Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery themselves have prerequisites (Test-Driven Development, automation, pairing/mobbing) that, overall, make Extreme Programming (XP) practices seem foundational to agility. XP has a long and proven history of increasing code quality, decreasing defects, and enhancing team members’ clarity about their work, generating alignment.
• Reduced risk: Short feedback cycles and higher quality dramatically reduce the technical risk of an initiative. Business risk is also dramatically reduced as the team incorporates customer feedback, delivers early and often, and continuously inspects and adapts both the product and their own practices.
• Faster ROI: Since agility focuses on big-value-up-front, you can deliver the most relevant, biggest-bang-for-buck value right out of the gate, and get more benefits (and revenue!) that much quicker.
• Knowing when to stop: big-value-up-front means that the point where it makes sense to stop funding is more obvious. There’s no distant promised land of greater value: once an initiative has delivered its greatest benefits (or failed to do so), funding can be reassigned.

What do you think of “Relevance” as a way of framing benefits of agility? How have you framed the benefits of agility to different people, and how did they react?