Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Hello, everyone; welcome to the Five Minutes Podcast. Today, I like to talk about agility and agile. Many people mix these two concepts. They are, of course, very similar, but they are not the same thing. What is agility? Agility is your, and your team ability to react and adapt fast means you are agile to move to adapt to the changing circumstances of your work environment. This is agility. It's many times related to speed, but it's not only speed is your flexibility is your ability to adapt, to change, to reframe, revisit, work and manage uncertainty on the other side. What is agile? Agile is related to a method, a method that aims to bring agility to your delivery, your pros at delivery, your product delivery and why. I'm saying this because many people think that there is a cause and effect that is 100 percent obvious, and it's not. I know many people using the agile method without being agile, without having agility. Why? Because sometimes, you implement this in such a cumbersome way. It's such a strange and chaotic way that instead of bringing the agility and this agile mindset, you are just creating, I would say, a monster of chaos and lack of governance in your project environment. On the other side, you can have agility framing clear your scope because if you have the mindset of making quick decisions, adapting to the different circumstances, you can do that.
And why I'm saying this, I'm not pleased. I'm not defending that one is right and one is wrong, please. What I am defending is that we need to keep in mind the concept of agility. And with this in the mindset and with these incorporated in our culture, we can use any method and delivery agility. It does not, for example. Otherwise, some projects with a very clear and detailed scope like, for example, the Webb telescope and people will say, Oh, this project has no agility. No. Maybe if you bring that project to life using a completely chaotic environment, you may risk losing billions of dollars, so you have delays and everything because this is the part of that type of project, that sort of project that you cannot fix after the release. The space telescope is like that. Imagine software that, when you release, you cannot change anymore. You cannot change anything. If there is a breach for a hacker, it's over. This is what happens there. So this is why, for example, the concept of agility need to feed on the type of project you are using. And of course, and I need to be clear here that the agile methods of any sort from scale agile to discipline agile from scrum to Kanban, what do they aim if you use them properly? They aim to help you to bring agility.
So they are, I would say, the foundations for you to build in in your process. For example, the scrum master, the product owner, exist exactly to bring agility. So at any time you are developing a product, just after you think about the method you are using, what do you need to think? Is that? Am I being agile enough and don't answer? Oh, of course, I'm agile because I'm using scrum. No, no. You can use the scrum and mess up with everything. I'm talking about how do you adapt to change? How do you navigate complexity? This is why, for example, I really like the concept of principles that the book has that brings to has the agile manifesto. The manifesto is a set of principles. If you have these principles in your DNA, it's impossible for you to not be agile, no matter if you are using a predictive approach to build a railroad or if you are using an extremely agile method to deliver a digital transformation project. Always think about that. Always think about how you can build this cultural mindset of bringing agility through agility and agile mindset to your teams. And this is what matters, no matter what is your delivery approach. Think about that interview next week with another Five Minutes podcast.
