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Modern Analyst Forums Business and Sy... Agile Analysis ... Agile needed or just another re-invention of the wheel?

1/30/2020 8:18 PM

	UserFocussedAnalysis
2 posts

Agile needed or just another re-invention of the wheel?

Ive been in IT going on a few decades now, I do BA work and usually people hire me to be the PM, BA, SA (assistant), DBA, Tester etc, copy and insert SDLC roles.

And Im ok with this.

But I look at Agile, which Im certified in, and I wonder is this another ITIL, that for some reason people feel necessarry when really it isn't. Aside from naming roles and processes around Rugby Union, which I find incredibly unprofessional, I don't see as a Project Manager or a BA or a UX designer or any role, how it really improved anything.

If you run Prince 2 as PM methodology and you use RAD as your iteration methodology, you should be effectively doing the same objective but with faster and more defined iterations, requirements, testing, acceptance, whatever part of the SDLC you want to critique.

I just feel Agile whilst if you ignore is silly naming conventions, can (not always) improve iteration speed its an ok method.

But why re invent the wheel when Water Fall with RAD iterations does the same think but with clearer objectives and roles.

Ive run projects with both and I see far better results with Prince 2 methods, providing you also use Rapid Application Development.

I think Agile folk got this idea in their head that waterfall means slow year long iterations, and perhaps they worked in government type sectors where that was the case, while rest of us were pumping out weekly or bi weekly iterations with full tested use cases that are then signed off by the Sponsor and or Stakeholder/s.

Interested to hear other experiences with rapid waterfall development vs agile.......

Unfortunately its there now and its something one has to know how to run given its been sold as more "Agile" when IMO thats a false narrative based on situations where SDLC is run unnecessarily slow (perhaps on purpose in some instances)

Please, this is not a beat up on Agile, more a curiosity as to where slow Waterfall SDLC created the proposed need for agile. The concept is a good one, its just I feel its already there and has been the whole time, depending on who is running the SDLC and with what methods. :-)

2/13/2020 11:53 PM

	Rich Anderson
1 posts

Re: Agile needed or just another re-invention of the wheel?

The problem with "Agile" is that it only solves a small part of the problem. If the objective is to increase throughput in the delivery process, then a much more robust (and automated) approach is called for. I suggest the book Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble as a good primer.

2/23/2020 9:13 AM

	Usman_chiefoftheglen
9 posts

Re: Agile needed or just another re-invention of the wheel?

Ive worked for a few companies, all waterfall. We tried a "water-gille" approach recently (suggested by the PM!) but we ended up defaulting back to waterfall.

Agile does work, but only if the entire organisation is bought into it and it is championed from the top. In my experience, waterfall does the job.

3/11/2020 12:28 PM

	Larry Blankenship
3 posts

Re: Agile needed or just another re-invention of the wheel?

The problem for most places that try Agile is they treat it like a noun instead of an adjective.

Agility is a goal, not a method. Agile is descriptive in that it describes the things that should be valued and gives some principles to follow, but all in all it completely stays out of how to do it. That causes frustration for management and those who want a manual.

I personally follow a set of principles called Modern Agile:

Make Safety a Prerequisite
Experiment and learn Rapidly
Make People Awesome (or at least find ways to help them become awesome in achieving their goals)
Deliver Value Continuously

I personally feel that you can't do the last if you're not doing the other three with consistency. Making people awesome isn't forcing anyone to meet your definition of awesome, it's helping them identify what they need to be awesome or helping them to realize they can be awesome. (That includes both the end user and the people on the team)

This is where frameworks like Scrum, XP, Lean and others come in as a way to achieve agility. The problem is that most people treat them as the end rather than as a beginning of their journey to Agility.

I'm a certified Scrum Master through Scrum.org and one of the first thing I learned in studying for the test is that there are way too many people who want to treat Scrum like stone tablets from on high rather than as a starting point. That gets completely away from experimenting and learning rapidly. If you aren't using your retrospectives to identify what you can do better and then working very hard to do it better, you've already missed the point.

5/11/2020 7:21 PM

	Han_solo
2 posts

Re: Agile needed or just another re-invention of the wheel?

I saw it worked (& not worked) in the project I was last in.

What worked:

- As the business was not very clear on what exactly they wanted, this approach gave them the opportunity to experiment (with some boundaries and guidance of course). In the end, nothing beats having something you can see/play to work with, regardless of how rudiment it is.

- Writing requirements with focus on the 'WHY' gave the entire team perspective of what the business value or goals that we were trying to achieve. This is very underrated IMO.

- It promoted a lot more ownership and transparency among the working teams.

What did not work:

- Ceremonies for the sake of ceremonies

- Little to no planning (i guess this came down to the team's maturity of understanding Agile practices. We needed planning but at a shorter horizon)

- Delivering via Agile practice is challenging if the rest of the organisation are not supportive or not ready for such approach. For example, we needed more engagement time with SMEs but their line managers were not supportive of this. Example 2, Finance had a fixed price view and demanded very clear deliverables/artecfacts and stage gates.

- It is a lot more work than what people expect (eg. more engagement, more rework/refactoring, more introspective activites)