Agile is a time boxed, iterative approach to software delivery that builds software incrementally from the start of the project, instead of trying to deliver it all at once near the end. It works by breaking projects down into little bits of user functionality called user stories, prioritizing them, and then continuously delivering them in short two week cycles called iterations.
The Agile Manifesto is as follows:
“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work, we have come to value
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Hierarchical Decision Making
Most companies today are still organized as hierarchies as the predominant organizational approach. This structure was invented 100s of years ago helping societies and organizations to become more productive. In a hierarchical organization we have appointed, formal leaders with a clearly assigned responsibility and authority (usually called “managers”).
At the same time, the world has developed and looks quite different than at the time hierarchies were invented. For a long time, the hierarchical approach could cope with that development, but the time has come where we see more and more of these organizations struggle with change. What happened?
Decision Making – the Agile way
The primary goal of agile approaches is to enable fast actions in dynamic and unpredictable environments. According to the research of the past forty years, self-organization is one of the strategies here. It allows fast adaptation and resilience to change on one side and the stability needed to develop and run large systems on the other side2. Consequently all agile approaches are designed to foster self-organization.
There are several ingredients a system needs to develop self-organizing behavior,
- You need a minimum number of independent actors.
- These actors need to maintain open bi-directional interactions that allow them to exchange information they don’t expect.
- You need sufficient diversity among these actors to allow a productive tension generating the ability to change.
- You need enough alignment on a (business) goal to make sure that the diversity does not lead into uncoordinated chaos.
So the balance between autonomy and alignment is one of the key-factors in any Agile organization, enabling the speed of adaption. Too much autonomy or too little alignment lead to unproductive chaos. Lack of autonomy or too detailed alignment lead to loosing the dynamic adaptability of agile teams and thus one of the core business values you get from Agile.
Agile uses team collaboration as the primary method to create alignment and ensure communication. This is in contrast to a centralized workflow breakdown in traditional organizations done by process engineers who are not part of the delivery teams. The team plans together, communicates at least on a daily basis and celebrates success together. And the team is also responsible to set appropriate policies, such as the Definition of Done.
Policies are set via Retrospectives – The core practice of agile teams to find and maintain their policies is the Retrospective. How this is done is not strictly defined, but a large body of techniques has developed over time, many of them adapted from existing material on participatory decision making.
“Cargo Cult” – the pointless duplication of external form without grasping its essence.
So even though agile teams often take significant effort to make their policies explicit, they also gather a lot of tacit knowledge, usually referred to as their team culture.
