When interviewing candidates, it’s so interesting how many mention that their companies use an Agile “hybrid” framework for product development. To me, this strongly reflects the deep need for flexibility among creatively minded software teams in terms of how they work. They often instinctively recognize that certain elements of various frameworks suit their context - but others do not.
Although Agile has fallen out of favour a little in recent years, I’m still a strong advocate for coaching teams on important Agile concepts, rather than rigidly following any framework. For teams still maturing their product development workflow, this often means introducing Scrum. Not for its rituals, but to align everyone on the team, as well as giving them the opportunity to experience some important fundamentals around flow and incremental delivery of value to customers.
Here are the key concepts from various Agile frameworks that I personally have found illuminating.
#1. Key concepts from Scrum
- Making work visible
- Encouraging Close Collaboration
- Breaking Work Down
- Clearing Blockers
- Incremental Delivery
- Continuous Improvement
#2. Key concepts from Kanban
- Visualizing the Workflow
- Limiting Work in Progress
- Pull vs. Push
- Pulling the Andon cord
- Kaizen / Continuous improvement
#3. Key concepts from Lean
- Focusing on Value for Customers
- Running well designed experiments
- Creating an MVP and learning from that
- Embracing Small Batches
- Eliminating Waste
- Pull vs Push
- Continuous Improvement
Notice what they all have in common? 😄
For a deeper dive on what each of these concepts entails and, more importantly, why they are so effective in creating flow, please look out for my next three articles. Because in my experience, when teams master even a few of these concepts, magical things can happen.
