Everyone wants to be Agile

Everyone wants to be Agile, isn’t it?
I notice that adopting the Agile methodology is lately a trend and if we are looking at the Annual State of Agile survey from 2016 release by VERSIONONE we can see that 98% from the Agile projects are successfully delivered.

And of course that everyone wants to be Agile as using Agile in project delivery bring benefits like:
• Ability to manage changing priorities
• Project visibility
• Project predictability
• Project risk and cost reduction
• Software quality
• Increased team productivity
• Happier teams

But there is a difference between wanting and succeeding as there is difference between Doing Agile and Being Agile.
From Doing Agile to Being Agile is a long journey to follow, but this is a topic for another article :)

A lot of people think that having some ceremonies in place, changing sprint scope often, skipping retrospective, having deadlines with no scope negotiations or even working overtime to meet them means to be Agile.

But what means to be Agile after all?

I would say that this can be answered by reflecting on the following questions:

Do we value more individuals and interactions overs processes and tools?
Do we value more working software and customer collaboration over checking things from a list or defining long term plans?
Are we responding to change over following a plan with an established deadline?
How often we assess our way of working and which are the improvements made lately?
How many compromises are we doing to deliver our project?
How often we reflect on Agile values and how those are integrated with the organization values or with the context of our company?
How many Agile anti patterns we can see in our day to day work life?
Do we have the Agile mindset?

There is a quote that I really like and I would like to share it with you:

What about you?
How Agile are you?

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