Agile as an enterprise strategy (Last of three parts)

In summary, the core principles to which Agile is anchored upon is the belief that collaboration is better than overly reliant to a fixed plan or blueprint. While businesses are used to planning, Agile advocates think that planning can be a waste of resources. For example, companies spend a lot of time holding meetings to plan the next best thing to do, however, meetings often end up in abstract concepts not real things. Thus, meetings often become liabilities than assets -- it is "toxic." Meetings "convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute." says Internet icon and author Jason Fried.

Fried, also Basecamp's CEO, observes that the staggering cost of meetings to a company. In his example, if one is going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour, and you in-vite ten people to attend, that's actually a ten-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. You're trading ten hours of productivity for one hour of meeting time. "And it's probably more like fifteen hours, because there are mental switching costs that come with stopping what you're doing, going somewhere else to meet, and then resuming what you were doing beforehand." For Agile advocates, if meetings are necessary they must also go through some kind of cost-benefit analysis, too.

Between a good plan and an adaptive process the latter prevails. An adaptive process makes plenty of legroom for changes [that need to be done] in between while enabling both the service provider and the customer to work together while the project is ongoing. Flexibility best describes the Agile method. Changes are seen as opportunities for collaboration with customers to improve a product or service. 

Agile thrives on the least resource with the goal of a maximum gain. If you're the type of business that usually complains about where to get the money, the manpower and experience and etc. then cheer up. Constraints are opportunities in disguise. Agile thinks that less is a good thing because it forces you to make do with what you have. There's no room for waste. "Ever seen the weapons prisoners make out of soap or a spoon? Get creative and you'll be amazed at what you can make with just a little." says Fried. 

If it took 50 years for many million-dollar companies to where they are now, Basecamp did it in 5 years. "When we were building Basecamp, we had plenty of limitations. We had a design firm to run with existing client work, a seven-hour time difference between principals (David was doing the programming in Denmark, the rest of us were in the States), a small team, and no outside funding. These constraints forced us to keep the product simple. These days, we have more resources and people, but we still force constraints."

While Agile is a process but it does not think that processes matter in a project. It may sound like a self-defeating principle but that is also its nature. Agile is not a fixed proc-ess but anyone who wish to challenge it may do so according to the demands of his business or project. Thus, Agile is a case by case process in which the methods vary from business to business.

And since Agile doesn't believe in a fixed process, it relies heavily on people. Martin Fowler, said to be the father of the modern Agile method thinks that behind every proc-ess are people. And since people falter, processes can fail. This is not to suggest that we should not trust the processes available, however, it is important to be aware that proc-ess can fail if they are to be managed by incompetent people.

The thrust of Agile is that processes can work if we can trust the people who run them. Thus, Agile only works when the people behind it are also committed to the process. And when you consider adopting an Agile method in your company, get the right people and get them committed to it.    

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