I probably need to stop paying so much attention to my LinkedIn feed. It inevitably frustrates me. On the other hand, I channel the frustration into articles like this one. This time, as is often the case to be honest, my frustration comes from proponents of Agile who are focused on the pure ideals of what Agile was originally intended to be. Note that I didn’t write “what Agile is” because that's evolved, while some of the purists have not.

One exchange went something like “I can’t believe how many people claim that Kanban is an Agile methodology, next time someone says that to you, make sure to tell them that they’re wrong.” Which generated responses like “I know, it’s crazy, the next thing you know they’ll be claiming that Lean is an Agile methodology!” Now, the information conveyed isn’t wrong — Lean started in manufacturing long before the Agile Manifesto was written, and Kanban was originally a way to visualize the flow of work within Lean manufacturing environments.

My issue is that most people aren’t going to worry about the nuances of how these approaches started, what they were originally designed for, and whether they are part of ‘pure’ Agile. They’re just going to read that Lean and Kanban aren’t Agile and interpret that they are inappropriate for an organization that is looking to become more Agile. Which couldn’t be further from the truth.

The popular position on LinkedIn seems to be that consultants will bundle anything they want under the label of Agile to sell their services to organizations who don’t know any better. As a result, organizations end up with methodologies that aren’t aligned with the Agile Manifesto, and they need to be “protected.”

What do organizations want from Agile?

I’ve worked with a lot of organizations over the years who have been looking to improve their use of Agile. In some cases, they are trying to increase the number of projects they could deliver using an Agile style of work, and in others it’s been a commitment to an Agile transformation that will allow them to apply Agile principles to all activities within their business. All these organizations have their own ideas of what Agile means to them, and they’ve all explained their Agile concept in slightly different ways.

None of those organizations wanted me, or anyone else, to tell them that their Agile definition was wrong because it didn’t perfectly align with the ideals outlined at the time that the Agile manifesto was written. Nor did they want me to educate them only on methodologies and approaches that were developed as a direct result of that definition of Agile. They simply wanted to be able to improve the way that they worked.

Read more here.