Dave: The Agile Manifesto has become a legendary document within the Agile space. My name's Dave. I'm joined by Jags and Paddy and in this video we're going to take a very close look at what it means for you as an Agile practitioner.

Alright guys, so, the next topic we need to talk about is the Agile Manifesto which of course comes with a bunch of values, a bunch of principles and it might seem a bit daunting for people to engage with.

Of course, this document has achieved basically legendary status in the Agile community at this point. So it's definitely something we need to talk about. Do you want to tell us-, maybe just kick us off, Jags, with just a bit of information about it?

Jags: Well, the Agile manifesto was written in 2001. 20 years old.

Dave: Well, almost.

Jags: Almost. Yes. It was written by seventeen thought leaders called the Agile Alliance and they got together in Utah and they said there must be better ways of delivering software.

Dave: Specifically software.

Jags: In that instance, yes. And they said, 'Well, what do we believe are the critical success factors of building better software?' And this is where they came with four values.

We value individuals and their interactions. We value working software. We value change in customer collaboration. We value changing-, respond to the feedback and they were the four critical success factors and behind that we've got four principles or beliefs that we believe that teams should adhere to or teams and organisations should adhere to, to deliver better outcomes.

Dave: So, they came up with this manifesto but it was all about software and I think there is still a pretty strong perception that Agile is really best suited for software development and that maybe it's not really valuable for other organisations but obviously I think that's actually probably a myth at this point isn't it, Paddy?

Paddy: Yes, so, I guess if we just trace back the, sort of, origins from 2001 to where we are now and just see that journey, I sometimes refer to it as almost we're in the third age of Agile.

So, 2001 was very much about software engineers wanting to do things better. We wanted a new way of working.

If we think about other types of industry like manufacturing, we were doing things like lean manufacturing for many, many years but for software there really wasn't a, sort of, an agreed upon approach for building great software products and so many small Agile teams started to adopt these ways of working and then if we fast forward to probably around 2011 where some of the scaling frameworks, like, Safe, the scale Agile framework as well as others were popularised.

That was a point in time where it was almost the second phase, or the second age of Agile where teams wanted to go beyond just one or two teams and now software delivery teams wanted to deliver together over multiple locations where we had perhaps 50 or more people all working on a single product and now if we look at where we are today, it's the age of, sort of, business agility.

So, we alluded to business agility a little bit earlier. So this is where I see Agile has gone beyond just technology and beyond software and we're looking to embrace Agile ways of working across the enterprise and just some of the examples that I've personally been involved in. Again, going back to my, sort of, days in banking.

I did a lot of work within group audit so an area and a function of the bank that you perhaps don't always associate towards Agile ways of working. We were working with the auditors to start to structure their work in a slightly different way so rather than letting every individual go off and do their work and audit projects, we created a structure where we had multiple people swarming, working together on one or two audits together.

And they were able to plan together, they were able to do the work together and we had clear goals for when they were going to get engaged in doing these audits and it became just a much better way for the auditors to work within.

And there's lots of other industry examples but I'll let Jag share some of those before I, sort of, touch upon some of those.

Dave: Jags being like, 'Oh'.

Paddy: Wikispeed, Wikispeed.

Jags: Yes. You've got the example of car manufacturing, Wikispeed, and they were able to deliver a car to market within three months, I think, wasn't it? You can imagine a traditional car manufacturer company.

It would take them 10 years at least to get an idea of a concept of a car to actually onto the market and this organisation were able to do that within three months, by breaking down this car into components and creating a small team to build these components and to deliver a solution, a product, of reasonable value, reasonable quality, to market, which meets our stakeholder needs.

Dave: So we've got examples from manufacturing through to banks. It's definitely not just about software anymore.

Jags: So the Agile Manifesto, what it does, it creates a mindset or allows people to frame their ideas in order to deliver stuff.

Software, products, solutions or in education or in manufacturing. It allows us to create a mindset, a frame of mind how teams and organisations can organise themselves to deliver value.

Paddy: And just to add to that, I often hear people refer to Agile as a methodology or a framework and if we look at the literal definition of what Agile with a capital A is, it's this combination of four values and twelve principles and so what that tells us is we want to instil a certain culture within a team or an organisation.

The Agile Manifesto really isn't a methodology. It's not even a framework. It's just a set of values and principles. So, I'm going to take an example here, David, of if you've just come to QA and you've started with us for the very first day and I'm the manager and I say, 'David, here's our corporate values, I'd like you to read those corporate values and now go deliver a project for us.' How would you be feeling?

Dave: I would probably be feeling pretty out of my depth and a bit afraid actually that I'm going to do something that's not in line with that. Maybe I misinterpret it. I mean, at least I've got some idea of what I should be doing but I would still probably be feeling pretty nervous.

Paddy: Absolutely because those corporate values, they don't prescriptively tell you how to deliver a project.

We don't tell you the corporate the values. That is step one, two, three. What are your deliverables? What are the artefacts? So the corporate values that we have in most organisations, they are there to instil a certain type of culture within the team and the organisation and the same way we can start thinking about the Agile Manifesto. It's, again, to instil a certain behaviour within the teams. It doesn't prescriptively tell us how to deliver those projects.

Jags: And the challenge is organisations say, 'Well, we do our job.' But the values and principles, it's lip service. It doesn't provide a comfort blanket, a supportive structure to enable you to adhere to some of these practices and rules for (mw 07.46) frameworks.

Dave: So if I'm an advocate, I've come on this course. I'm trying to advocate for, you know, my organisation to really adopt this mindset, do you guys have any advice for me in that situation about how I can help people to understand the value of Agile in terms of those values and principles and to just maybe some tips and tricks around how we could look to get our organisation to adopt those?

Jags: I think the key thing is leaders. You need to learn, teach, coach and exhibit these ideal values and principles because too often leaders say 'We're going to do Agile.'

But, as I said before, it's lip service and individuals can't see those people adhering to these values and principles. They don't exhibit it. They don't coach it. Their behaviours have not been adjusted.

They've still got a traditional mindset, not an Agile mindset and therefore they think, 'Oh if they're not bought into it. Why should I change?'

Dave: So you think it's got to come from the top as well?

Jags: Well, we talk about the leadership. The leadership can be found anywhere within the organisation.

Dave: That's true. So it's not just a top down idea. Leadership, we should have leaders at every level right?

Jags: Absolutely.

Dave: Anything for yourself, Paddy, you would add to that?

Paddy: Yeah, no, I think you've hit the nail on the head. I think leadership exists amongst all of us and it's very much about, you know, not just having these values stuck on a poster somewhere and being put on the poster and being forgotten.

So, Simon Sinek often says these values that we have must live and breathe them and don't let them become this poster on the wall that we forget about.

So what the Agile Manifesto allows us to do is-, it's a constant reminder so when we're doing things like retrospectives, for example, where we're inspecting and adapting as a team, one thing that I always recommend for teams to do is go back to the Agile Manifesto and almost tick off some of those values to say, 'Are we living and breathing this stuff?'

So every two or three weeks we're making a conscious decision to go back to those values and principles so that we're not just using them as this poster on the wall.

So, leadership, absolutely, because one thing that I see a lot of teams struggle with is-, they get very excited about Agile ways of working so they'll start adopting the practices, some of the frameworks and as soon as they come across problem that they can't resolve in the team or they need some extra help they'll go to the leadership.

And if the leadership don't have the Agile mindset, they don't understood how is it that they could support the team, then it becomes very difficult for those teams to succeed.

Jags: Coming back to that point, you say, well, what you tend to find is you see pockets of individuals who have this Agile mindset in the organisation.

The challenge is the organisation doesn't adopt the Agile mindset and these teams get frustrated, you know? We want to work in a different way but the organisation is preventing us from doing that so this Agile mindset is not just about your traditional Agile tech teams. It's about how HR, finance, procurement, legal can all support the organisation to be able to deliberately rapidly respond to changing demands.

Dave: Yes. And ultimately as well the idea that self-organising teams are going to have the responsibility for their own work but also then for these-. For adopting that mindset, right? It's up to each of us to adopt those ways of thinking.

Paddy: And actually just to add to that I think traditional reward and recognition, it sometimes instils anti-Agile behaviours so if you think about our, sort of, traditional reward and recognition processes, they're very much focused on the individual so if I'm within an organisation, I have my own personal objectives.

My objective might be if I'm a business analyst, for example, which I was for many years might be to churn out really good requirements documents. So I'm very much focused on getting my part of the process done and making sure I do that well but really there's no incentive for me to help you with your work, right, David?

So, I'm going to be incentivised on my personal deliverables and so it creates this siloed working for many teams and in terms of our bonus structure as well, we're all fighting for a slice of that bonus and, again, it instils these anti-Agile behaviours because in Agile we really embrace collaboration so if we can maybe change our thinking slightly, so rather than just rewarding someone for the best document in the team, why don't we reward them for being the most collaborative person in the team?

So if I were to say in two months that, hey, I was able to help at least three other people in the team overcome these challenges. Well, now we're starting to live and breathe some of these Agile values and principles so I think the leadership is a great point but then there's absolutely over elements within the organisation that we can look at and I think HR is another key enabler for ensuring that we have the right values in place.