Agile Mastery: Transcend the Process
I’m currently going through a bit of a mental upheaval when it comes to agile methodology and process. For a long time, I’ve been a Scrum guy and not just any scrum guy, but a scrum guy who pokes fun at people who practice ‘ScrumBut’. To me the value of Scrum is in proper execution of the ceremonies. Over the past few months I’ve had this sinking feeling that I completely missed the point. Now I’m ready to admit it: I got it wrong. I’m using processa as a crutch, and my bet is that you and everyone on your team is too.
Stepping back for a minute, lets talk about what I mean by mastery. To create my operational definition I’d like to expropriate a martial arts concept, Shuhari. Shuhari encapsulates the three stages of mastery for Aikido which are, roughly translated:
- Learn fundamentals and techniques
- Detach from the traditional wisdom, revise techniques, innovate
- Transcend and completely depart from the forms and techniques without breaking the laws
Thinking about mastery in those terms, Scrum is agile for beginners. I know that’s going to insult some people. It is certainly a harsh look at the past 2-3 years of my career. Don’t get me wrong, I think Scrum is a great tool, but looking at it through eyes of experience makes me think that perhaps all of the process and ceremony inherent in Scrum is there to protect you from doing things wrong because you don’t know any better. It allows for easy adoption from the business by giving them metrics, predictability and obvious value, and it gives development the autonomy we desire, but its within in a framework so rigid you have to use the whole thing or breaks down very quickly and the value is lost.
The second phase is more of an experimentation phase, lets add some things and remove some things, figuring out a better process for your particular company. Now, I am dangerously close to my much maligned ScrumBut process except that in true ScrumBut the teams never started by actually doing Scrum properly. This is where my team is currently. We’re going through significant changes is our process management in order to become more in tune with our business goals. We’re trying to innovate within the Scrum process.
The phase I’m most excited about and the phase I want to get my company to is where we finally get to transcend the process. Interestingly enough I think, for me at least, this looks a lot like Kanban. Throughout the next several posts I’ll be discussing how I think we can substitute discipline and understanding for process and ceremony.
I want to remove the artificial sprint deadlines and replace them with business priorities that drive feature development. I want to take away the 2 week feedback loop and replace it with feature iterations that are as rapid as is necessitated by the teams that are involved. I want to align development with sales and operations in ways not possible because the process is prohibitive. I want to be so disciplined in the way we work that process becomes unnecessary. I want to master being Agile, and to do that I have to transcend the process.