Agile is a mindset that puts people first. It unleashes your employees’ potential in order to benefit your customers. This is unlikely to be done by squeezing more work out of your team members, but instead by creating an environment of participative leadership that autonomously removes sources of waste, dysfunctions and impediments to business value.

Paramount to achieving these outcomes is the endorsement of the four values and twelve principles captured in the Agile Manifesto. These propositions are not just applicable to sofware and hold true if you interchange the word software with whatever term (e.g. product, service) you find most relevant for your sector. The essence of the Manifesto outlines how to improve our collaborative ways of working in an ever changing world.

So how can you help your team really tick and be succesful? The Agile Manifesto states:

.. We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

.. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
.. Working software over comprehensive documentation
.. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
.. Responding to change over following a plan

.. That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

The last sentence is key: you should not overlook the right side of the statement. You will still enable your work through proccesses and accelerate it using tools. You will still need acute documentation. You absolutely still want to do plenty of plannning. Individuals and interactions, working software, customer centricity and responding to change are just valued more.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools looks to foster an environment of genuine commitment over compliance. It doesn’t let teams wrap themselves around a tool. It favors openness and transparency through conversations with each other, where people can raise their concerns in a coureageous and compassionate way, so that issues can be worked on together. It sets a framework whereby individuals are empowered to decide how best to move the business forward without necessarily needing managerial approval. Leaders should act as role models here. If they do not have time to talk, if they follow prescriptive processes without taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, that behavior will likely also cascade down to their managers and team members.

Working software over comprehensive documentation where “software” can be substituted for customer solutions. Being relevant in your target market is the single biggest measure of success and what you should value the most. Documentation should still happen in a manner that provides value to your team. The Agile practices tend to leverage documentation to ensure everyone is on the same page. One of Scrum’s pillars is transparency, where the project goal and upcoming priorities must be available to all stakeholders at all times to enable close inspection and adaptation. Likewise, Kanban at its core visualizes how value flows through an organization’s system or process to help identify improvement opportunities. Both practices centre their documentation around progress towards strategic goals, rather than going overboard with evaluating units of work or the volume of completed tasks.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation encourages open and honest lines of communication with your customer. Whether that customer is external or an internal stakeholder, the feedback should flow in terms of product usage and value. Agreement on time and budget is still of absolute importance. However, there should be room to act on market indicators. If the scope of requirements is changing, the business should not be trapped by mandates or have no other choice but to renegotiate terms. Rather than signing off scoped plans and working harder to get things moving, organizations can use product owners to analyze what actions are most appropriate, based on what is currently known from the market. Product Owners collaborate with both the customer and development team to quickly deliver on the slices most valuable to customers.

Responding to change over following a plan creates an environment in which focused creativity flourishes over status quo processes. Things should move quickly to improve. Customer solutions should be punctually redefined to respond to market trends. While we all make plans, the prime benefit of being able to pivot is that risk is reduced. As the transmission of new information flows through the business, it is important that projects have leeway to change course at the drop of a hat, to deliver business value as fast as possible.

In case the values do not serve as sufficient food for thought, they are backed up by 12 principles. Part 2 breaks each value down and lists which principles I believe most underpin each value.