Work Wisdom from the Agile Manifesto

Smart ways of working offer the double benefit of making work easier and delivering better outcomes, and one source of wisdom on smart ways of working is the Agile Manifesto, written in 2001 by the 17 signatories listed on the Agile Manifesto website. The Agile Manifesto is an outline for making software development less wasteful, less risky, and more flexible and responsive to changing customer needs. However, even though it was written for software development, its wisdom can be applied to just about any other work. This post focuses on some of the twelve principles of Agile software development and how you can use it to make sure that your work efficiently delivers the value that other people need, whether they be your teammates, managers, or your organization’s customers.

-            Work at a sustainable pace

-            Build what your customer needs and not what they don’t

-            Get feedback early and often

Work at a sustainable pace

Don’t try to get ahead with intense bursts of effort to build your career. It’s too easy for this to lead to burnout and demoralization well before you get very far. When just starting out in your career, it’s easy to forget that you have lots of workdays ahead of you, and you’ll get further in a career of consistent daily effort that you can keep up over the long haul. Here’s the eighth Agile Manifesto principle, encouraging work at a sustainable pace:

Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

While this is written in a software development context, the principle applies to work in general. Your career is a marathon and not a sprint, and being a consistent, reliable producer adds up over time. Plus, daily performance compounds your skills and capabilities (in other words, causes you to grow) without you even realizing it. Working at a steady pace leads to greater overall output, and the consistency of that approach leads to better quality work as well.

Build what your customer needs and not what they don’t

Ultimately, your job exists because there is some kind of “customer” who is willing to pay for what you produce in that job. Whether you’re producing for a consumer buying a product for personal use, or you’re making something to be used by a colleague in the next step of your company’s production process, you need to make something that meets standards of quality, quantity, and timeliness. What’s the most efficient way to make what is needed? It’s certainly not to make what is not needed. In addition to not producing something nobody needs (or even wants), producing specifically what your customer needs and nothing different often makes your work simpler. The tenth principle of the Agile Manifesto states it this way:

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.

Get feedback early and often

Remember how, in the last section, the point was made to not produce what is not needed? The Lean Startup by Eric Ries makes an excellent point that can be summarized in the remainder of this paragraph: How can that be called anything other than waste? Wasted time, wasted effort, maybe also wasted materials. Getting feedback from your customers early and often is the fastest way to produce what they truly need; this helps you to understand what they actually need (instead of what you think they need), and it even helps your customers better understand what they need (which is not always what they first ask for).

It’s worth borrowing The Lean Startup from your local library or buying your own copy and taking the time to read it.

Returning to the Agile Manifesto, getting feedback early and often is so important that it is arguably embodied in half of its twelve principles. Consider the first and third principles:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Delivering small amounts of work early and frequently allows customers to tell you of any changes that are needed while the amount of effort needed to make those changes is small. Additionally, this collaborative style of working with the customer sets the best possible tone for working together. You’re showing them that you’re working hard on their request, you’re keeping them frequently engaged throughout your work on their request, and you’re much more likely to have a happy customer by the time you finish working on and deliver their request.

The fourth and sixth principles also emphasize rapid feedback to clarify any ambiguities and identify any corrections needed, either with the customer or within your own team, while they are still small and easy to address:

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

There are two more principles that your work team can use to review how and how well work is done, leading to ways to improve both efficiency and quality of output over time; these are the seventh and twelfth principles:

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

With the seventh principle, replace “software” with whatever your team produces (unless software is what your team produces). Note that it’s not just something that works from a technical standpoint; software that runs and doesn’t crash the computer isn’t valuable if it doesn’t provide the functionality and level of quality the customer needs from it. Producing and delivering products that meet customer needs should be your team’s primary measure of progress. Once you have figured that out, then your team can reflect at regular intervals about how to gradually become more effective. This is where the Kaizen approach can come in handy to help you and your team find and implement small improvements that accumulate into a big impact over time.

Conclusion

Remember that your career will continue for many years ahead of you and that trying to work at too fast a pace will cause you to burn out long before the end. In contrast, the time you have means you can accomplish a lot (more than you can imagine, even) by working steadily at a pace you can sustain throughout your career. Stay focused on creating what your customer needs, as doing something else means delivering less than the maximum amount of value possible. To succeed at this, get feedback from your customers early and often, as you probably won’t precisely understand what they need at first, and what they say they want at first may be different from what they say they want by the time you deliver to them. These three points together will help you to deliver the most value possible during your career.

Check out the entire Agile Manifesto and its twelve principles. This post only applies select principles to three main points, and there’s more to learn from the manifesto than what is shared here.

Read the Agile Manifesto and its twelve principles to improve how you work today!

The next step on the roadmap: Why Learn About Project Management