Why Agile isn't Enough

Several events in the last few years have rendered the world virtually unrecognizable. The COVID-19 pandemic, as we all know, upended the world and transformed how we work, serving as the impetus for remote-work configurations that have swept the technology industry, in large part because workers yearn for work-life balances that aren’t merely nominal.

There are other less conspicuous changes in tech, as well. For the past 20+ years, Agile Software Development has been extolled as the gold standard, however, while there’s no doubt as to its efficacy, the 2020s are proving that new ideas are needed to navigate a new world. 

For years, Agile had been rightly regarded as the key to unlocking team potential because it provided essential practices that helped teams prioritize certain tasks without developing tunnel vision or overcommitting. For anyone who isn’t familiar with Agile, the general idea is that it’s incremental, iterative development by self-organizing teams. Under this umbrella of Agile, there are numerous practices including Scrum, Kanban, Lean and the Scaled Agile Framework(SAFe) that provide detailed frameworks engineering teams can follow to organize and to deliver their work.

However, all of these methods don’t take into account best practices pertaining to interpersonal dynamics between team members which has created an overreliance on Agile to mend rifts on a team—a problem considering that, while Agile helps make dysfunction visible, it wasn’t designed to be a panacea. Agile provides a valuable set of practices that help teams organize and prioritize their work while not overcommitting, but those practices alone won’t give you the results you need. 

The reason is simple: The foundation of any team is people. If the relationships between the people that make up the relationship system are struggling, then the team will struggle. If the team has strong relationships, creating a resilient group, then no matter what onerous challenge you put in front of them, they will be able to handle it. 

Often leaders want to use Agile to fix interpersonal relationships, but it’s not a band-aid to fix everything. Agile practices only help reveal underlying issues.

Here is an example:

A common problem I have noticed throughout my career is engineering managers who micromanage their teams, forcibly delegating tasks and coercing teams to commit to unrealistic deadlines. Unless the manager’s leadership acumen is addressed and problems rectified, they will continue using Agile practices, like story pointing during planning meetings, as another way to micromanage their teams. This lack of autonomy and ownership over work and deadlines leads to engineering teams not feeling accountable to deadlines and not caring if they are missed.  The only way to fix that is with leadership coaching rather than simply placing Agile practice in place. Without that extra layer of coaching, I have seen countless teams going through the motions of ‘Agile’ practices but not getting results, overworking and generally failing at what they are trying to accomplish. 

When I worked at Salesforce, the technology teams were typically tasked with delivering exceptionally challenging results in the lead up to the annual Dreamforce conference. We were successful because we prioritized the work itself, communication between teams, and keeping morale high by ensuring that everybody understood they were part of a team delivering the extraordinary technology that was Dreamforce’s calling card. It is a foregone conclusion that conflicts arose, but we promptly found resolutions. Yes, we followed an Agile mindset but it was that combined with the trust on the team that led to incomparable execution. 

In order to create the teams and the workplaces we all want to work in, you have to be able to build healthy teams that embody Agile Values such as transparency, accountability, continuous improvement, respecting people and predictability. You can do this by not only following Agile practices but also by creating teams that trust each other and live those values every day.  Living these values requires trust, communication, vulnerability and general psychological safety from team members. Systems coaching provides this foundation when working with teams which is why Echelon Coaching was started. My goal is to provide my clients with more than just knowledge of Agile methods by helping them build healthy teams so they have a strong foundation as a business and can deliver in the toughest of circumstances.

Based on my experience, the hard part of running a business is managing the people and relationships. If you can get that right, then you can build teams and companies that can accomplish anything.