Doing Agile Vs.

Being Agile
NK Shrivastava and Phillip George, RefineM LLC
When organizations adopt agile practices before fully absorbing related principles and mindset, their
teams may struggle with the implementation and achieving results. Understanding these problems and
how they affect customers and teams is the first step to making concrete and lasting changes. Focusing
on value-driven delivery, preferring customer collaboration to documentation, and allowing the Product
Owner and Scrum Master to perform their roles well are three of the many changes that can help teams
fully embrace the agile mindset and realize its benefits. In this article, we will share insights about how
organizations can make these shifts and become fully agile.
Understanding agile principles and mindset is an important first step in the journey to agile adoption.
Often, we see organizations struggle with their agile implementations because they miss this first step.
They adopt the ceremonies, roles, and processes of agile without first understanding and embracing the
underlying foundation. In other words, they do agile without being agile.
Symptoms of this problem can affect both the customer and teams. Symptoms affecting the customer
include lack of value-based, consistent, and fast delivery; no change in time to market, or worse, an
increase in time to market; and conflict between agile and opposing frameworks in different parts of the
organization. Within teams, these symptoms include inconsistency with ceremonies and processes, lack
of team empowerment, poor execution of roles, resistance to changes, and struggles to meet even basic
iteration goals.
In this article, we further describe symptoms of merely doing agile, briefly summarize agile principles
and mindset, and provide solutions to help customers and teams reap the benefits of being fully agile.

www.refineM.com Contact@RefineM.com 405 N. Jefferson Ave, Springfield, MO 65806 417.763.6762

Symptoms Affecting Customers

Many symptoms of doing agile rather than being agile can affect value delivery to the customer,
including the following:
1. Delivery is not value-based, consistent, or fast. When customers do not receive value out of the
software delivery, it can often mean that teams are hurrying to check each item off of their
backlog list without considering whether each item is adding value to the delivery. When
delivery is not consistent, teams may be shifting testing to the end of the iteration and then
struggling to finish all of it before delivering software.
In either case, the customer is not receiving consistent delivery of the highest-value features,
user stories, and tasks. Because of these issues, delivery also is not faster.
2. Time to market has not improved. If time to market has stayed the same or increased under an
agile implementation, teams may be struggling to identify the minimum viable product. Without
having a strong understanding of the minimum viable product, teams may try to include too
much in each iteration.
Lack of improvement in time to market may also stem from teams waterfalling iterations, or
devoting one iteration each to design, building, and testing. When organizations embrace agile
principles and mindset and use agile effectively, time to market almost certainly improves.
3. Some departments or teams are not practicing agile. When only parts of an organization are
agile, confusion and conflict can quickly result. Without common understanding, procuring
needed resources for an agile team can be difficult. The process of integrating code between
departments or teams using different frameworks can also suffer.
Symptoms Affecting Teams
The following symptoms of doing agile rather than being agile can affect teams:
1. Teams are not empowered. Many organizations struggle to transition from a traditional
command-and-control power structure to a team-focused structure empowering teams to make
their own decisions. If agile teams are being micromanaged, their speed decreases and the
chance of conflict increases. In addition, when teams do not feel empowered, they tend not to
think in innovative ways, preferring instead to follow orders.
2. Teams are inconsistent with ceremonies and processes. They may struggle with consistency from
iteration to iteration, or with performing the same ceremonies or processes between iterations.
For example, a team might hold a review two days after finishing one iteration and three days
after the next one, or they may hold a review after the first iteration but not the second. In
addition, different teams may work differently, causing additional confusion.

www.refineM.com Contact@RefineM.com 405 N. Jefferson Ave, Springfield, MO 65806 417.763.6762

3. The Product Owner and/or Scrum Master do not execute their roles well. The Product Owner
influences value-based delivery, affecting customer satisfaction. The Scrum Master influences
team empowerment and output. If symptoms are found with either the customer or team,
either the Product Owner or Scrum Master may be missing a key part of his or her role.
4. Teams resist changes. Agile welcomes changes, even late in the project or development cycle,
by incorporating them into the product backlog. If there is resistance to changes, or the team is
not incorporating changes well, then teams may not have fully absorbed agile principles.
5. Teams struggle to meet iteration goals. In agile, teams need to consistently meet iteration goals.
If teams fail to meet their goal persistently over two to three iterations, they may not have fully
embraced agile principles and mindset.
These symptoms represent not only problems that can hinder agile adoption, but also opportunities to
develop a greater understanding of agile principles and mindset. In the following section, we provide a
brief overview of agile principles and mindset.
Agile Principles and Mindset
Fully understanding agile principles and the agile mindset starts with the Agile Manifesto, formulated in
2001. It is summarized by four key values1. These values emphasize, not prescribe, one principle over
another. For example, the first value, Individuals and interactions over processes and tools, means to
favor individuals and interactions, not eliminate processes and tools entirely.
The most important aspect of the Agile Manifesto is its emphasis on value-based delivery. By
emphasizing the items on the leftindividuals and interactions, working software, customer
collaboration, and responding to changeteams and organizations are more likely to deliver value
quickly and more consistently, shrinking time to market and enhancing value to customers.
Revisiting the fundamentals of agile to absorb key values and principles is the first step to turning
around any troubled agile transition. In the following section, we describe concrete steps to resolve
many of the symptoms described previously.

1 Manifesto for Agile Software Development (2001). Accessed 11 November 2015 from http://agilemanifesto.org/.

www.refineM.com Contact@RefineM.com 405 N. Jefferson Ave, Springfield, MO 65806 417.763.6762

Solutions to Symptoms Affecting Customers and Teams

If any of the symptoms described above are present and are affecting customers or teams, then the
journey to being fully agile has probably hit a roadblock. The following concrete actions can be taken to
resolve the symptoms affecting customers or teams:
1. Start from being agile, rather than doing agile. Figure 1 shows the path from being agile to
doing agile from bottom to top2.

Figure 1. Start from Being Agile, Rather Than From Doing Agile.
Understanding the agile principles and mindset needs to be seen as the foundation for agile
success. Once teams and organizations build that foundation, they can expand it in order to
move toward value-based, consistent delivery and address many of the other problems
described in the previous sections. Many teams and organizations start from the top without
doing the foundational work, which can cause their agile implementation to suffer.
2. Strengthen the Product Owner and Scrum Master roles. The Product Owner can solve many of
the customer-facing issues by helping the team sustain a focus on the highest priorities. The
product owners specific responsibility is to ensure that the product backlog is prioritized and
the minimum viable product is defined so that teams are able to deliver working software
consistently in order of priority. With these conditions in place, delivery becomes fast and
consistent, increasing customer satisfaction.

2 Adapted from PMI-ACP Exam Prep, Second Edition, by Mike Griffiths, p.24.

www.refineM.com Contact@RefineM.com 405 N. Jefferson Ave, Springfield, MO 65806 417.763.6762

The Scrum Master can solve team-facing issues by developing an efficient and consistent
process and providing guidelines and support to teams. The Scrum Masters specific
responsibility is to clarify roles and responsibilities within agile, set and meet feasible iteration
goals, and remove barriers to success. Allowing the Scrum Master to perform better can address
any of the symptoms affecting teams.
Because these roles are so intricately tied to issues facing the team from the inside and the
outside, having a skilled and experienced Product Owner and Scrum Master, each of whom is
capable of doing his or her role well, is a strong first step toward becoming fully agile. With the
Product Owner and Scrum Master both working well, teams will be working on the highestvalue user stories and tasks and will be empowered to do what they need to succeed. They will
also develop more consistency with agile ceremonies, meet iteration goals, and respond better
to changes.
3. Prefer customer collaboration to documentation. One aspect of waterfall projects that does not
work well in agile is the large specifications (or spec) document that fully outlines everything the
team has to do. In agile, team members need to develop comfort with the idea that they will not
know everything they need to do up-front. Design and planning will happen up to the point the
team needs for the first iteration, and then the team will design and plan the next iteration in a
rolling-wave style.
If a team member needs an answer to a question to fulfill a story or task in an iteration, he or
she can ask the customer and get the answer in a way that adds value to both customer and
team. Through this collaboration, teams can also learn more about the customers highest
priorities, helping them keep those in the forefront and develop a minimum viable product to
meet customer needs. By working with customers, teams can improve customer time to market.
4. Find an agile coach or trainer. Agile coaching and training can be very helpful to teams struggling
to integrate agile principles and mindset into their practice. Coaching can help people in specific
roles learn to perform those roles better, helping them enhance their teams chemistry and
output. Product Owners and Scrum Masters who are struggling can benefit in particular from
coaching to help them identify how best to perform their roles.
Training can help teams by removing them temporarily from the project so they can focus on
what they need to improve to become more fully agile. Training also gives teams a venue in
which to express positive and negative aspects and work together toward improvement.
5. Consider a hybrid framework. One reason agile teams may struggle on certain projects is that
the projects are not a good fit for agile. Not every project can be done using agile. Organizations
need to have a way to do those projects in a more traditional way while still preserving the
ability for agile teams to thrive, thus making the entire organization agile.

www.refineM.com Contact@RefineM.com 405 N. Jefferson Ave, Springfield, MO 65806 417.763.6762

A hybrid framework combining aspects of agile and waterfall can help organizations succeed by
allowing each project to be carried out using the methodology that works best for it. (For more
on where agile is a good fit, you can read our blog post, Is Agile a Silver Bullet?)
6. Practice continuous improvement. Teams can start practicing continuous improvement in two
ways. First, they can identify and eliminate sources of waste using tools and ceremonies such as
value stream mapping and retrospectives. Second, they can follow best practices and Lean
principles to improve their flow. By practicing continuous improvement, teams move closer to a
cadence in the spirit of agile, helping them internalize principles and cultivate the mindset.
These benefits, in turn, empower them to deliver more value faster, increasing customer
satisfaction and time to market.
Conclusion
There are many benefits of agile, including faster and more consistent value delivery, greater customer
satisfaction, and continuous improvement of teams and organizations. To realize these benefits, teams
and organizations need to internalize and embrace agile principles and mindset as much as they can. If
this important step has not been taken, the agile implementation can suffer from symptoms that affect
both customers and teams.
Making the shift to being fully agile can be difficult because it requires fundamental shifts in
management power structures and delivery processes. In addition, not all organizations will benefit
from the agile approach. If this is the case, recognizing that agile will not fit can help organizations find a
different solution, such as introducing a hybrid framework that integrates agile and traditional
methodologies.
For organizations that have recognized the value of agile and decided to make the transition, following
these steps can help them carry out the work necessary to internalize the agile mindset. By starting with
being agile and moving toward doing agile, teams and organizations can sidestep many of the
challenges of agile implementation and move to consistent value delivery quickly, realizing the benefits
of agile faster.
If youd like more guidance on Agile, please visit our Ebooks section and download Ebooks on Agile,
including Top 5 Challenges in Agile, Top 5 Concerns with Scaling Agile, and Top 5 Warning Signs
Agile Isnt Working For You.

References
1. Griffiths, Mike (2015). PMI-ACP Exam Prep. Second Edition. RMC Publications, Inc.
2.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development (2001). Accessed 11 November 2015 from
http://agilemanifesto.org/.

www.refineM.com Contact@RefineM.com 405 N. Jefferson Ave, Springfield, MO 65806 417.763.6762