BrainScrum

The single most important benefit Agile approaches brought to the IT industry is neither technical, nor process related, nor organizational. Let me explain.

From what I can remember, before the Agile movement emerged, the software engineering crowd rarely moved away from the technical argumentation. I think the only time it moved a little was at the beginning of the pattern movement which, by the way, was blamed by many to contain a romantic element like the research of the “quality without a name” clearly at odds with the mainstream technical soul.

Issues like what values and principles stand behind an approach and what beliefs are considered true were almost always lacking while others like in what contexts those values, principles and beliefs are meaningful were usually present in a latent form (aka: you needed to look hard to find them scattered as they were among all the technicalities).

Agile approaches, on the other hand, start from the values and the principles. The beliefs are a little more explicit than before even though still not fully uncovered or better, not everyone yet is ready to accept even the possibility that there might be beliefs behind them which might not be true for every single reality.

Yet again this is not what I consider the single most important benefit brought by the Agile movement to the industry: the single most important benefit is a sort of Business Awareness.

I finally see and hear people, regardless of their official role, talking about business value and how they can help delivering it. Not just theoretical discussions about it but actual actions, contributions, body of knowledge, experience sharing. I see technical people interested in return on investment, opportunity cost, GDP and sometimes cash flow.

I’ll go so far as to say that nowadays if a team is doing all the good Agile/XP stuff like TDD, refactoring, continuous integration, etc, etc but I don’t hear people talking about delivery of business value I’m usually worried because more often than not it means some fundamentals are missing and people are in a sort of “agile Assimilation mode”.

As the title of this post says: now what? Well, this is the first step! The second actually. Often business value is repeated so many times it becomes an empty mantra and even I cannot stand it anymore. To make a parallel is like repeating ad nauseam OOP or TDD or pick_up_the_thing_you_prefer: it’s not gonna make it happen! Now we are aware of it but we still don’t know how to affect it, what it exactly means, why it works the way it works and what we can do about it.

For the same reason we keep saying that we need to understand values, principles and beliefs behind Agile in order to fully understand it and be able to adopt it and adapt it to our reality we need to understand the fundamental building blocks of any business in order to understand why we do what we do, regardless of the chosen approach.

The next step is developing Business Acumen and I hope to find the time to write more about it in the near future.