This is the first of a series of posts on the agility; of indeterminate length and intermittent in nature it will, of necessity be at times polemical and curmudgeonly. To set the context, it all started with the Agile manifesto, went onto the Agile method wars (as yet no peace settlement but its settled into trench warfare with he occasional football match at Christmas) and is now splitting into intensive, and I think irreversible, commodification on the one hand and as a parasite on the general failures of strategy and organisation practice on the other. Now commodities have value and sooner or later a significant number of parasites become symbiotic, so this is not all doom and gloom. There is potential her, but not if we simply repeat patterns of partial, contextual success.
A common theme to this series will be Lewis Carroll for reasons that will be self-evident if they are not already. I will capitalise anything that arises from the Agile manifesto as it applies to software and related service development; lower case for the more general use of the idea.
More on all of that in subsequent posts but for the moment I want to look at, and define some key terms that are all too often confused and conflated, not to mention being subject to nonsensical questions of status. We had aspects of this with complexity with people privileging methods for complexity over those for order, despite the fact that both have equal contextual value. The desire for universal methods rather than contextual understanding remains a scary aspect of organisational work, as does claiming that a collection of methods coupled with a set of ideological beliefs is a framework.
So to five definitions all things, all of which are legitimate, all of which have value:
Now calling a method a framework and taking an ideological approach to its adoption is a venial sin; aggregating everything you think people might want to buy is a mortal sin and we see both in the Agile movement. I have a nasty suspicion we are going to see the same approachs, which have failure hard baked into them, with the wider adoption of agility as an idea.
More on all of this in future posts, including the consequences of confusion.
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