Over the past decade or even more, the term Agile became very popular and familiar. Especially in software development Agile is very common and very well known approach, promising effective, quality and early software delivery.

For anyone not familiar with Agile, in short Agile approach is suggesting collaborative effort of team(s), customers and end users. Furthermore it proposes continuous improvement, iterative development, early delivery, self-organisation of teams and high adaptation to the change(s), as we don’t know what we will discover on the way of building something new. Therefore, in process of development we will adopt our route to what we discover. Maybe we’ll find that something that we initially planned will not work at all and maybe we’ll just find much better way or we’ll discover completely different path to follow. This is why Agile is suggesting high adaptation to the change.

So in simpler terms, you can think of Agile as approach where we don’t put a lot of effort in planning, we focus more on delivery of working piece of product. We plan as only as much as it’s needed and we also very quickly adopt to the change.  It happens many times, that people adopting to Agile way of thinking, are doing things in Agile manner also in private life.

Let me try to put it in an understandable example:

Imagine that you need to plan the vacation for your family and you want to make a tour between destinations A, B, C and D. If you are following Agile, you will plan only as much as it’s needed to in order to have some initial plan. You know that you will start with destination A, so you will book the staying there, let’s say for couple of nights. For other destinations B, C and D you will not make any detailed plans, as along the way there can be many unforeseen events that can change the direction of your tour, such as bad weather in that area, terrorism in one of the planned destinations or simply you will discover that destination A leads to another destination F, which is far more fabulous than B. Therefore, with Agile you will only set the initial plan, not having everything set in stones and you will refine the rest of the details as you go. Sounds pretty okay, right?

I heard many times that this kind of approach is considered to be lazy and sloppy, as people don’t want to invest to much effort in organization. They just have initial plan and decide on the fly what next.

On another hand I met also some people who are doing everything on the fly. They really, truly lack in any kind of organisational skills and even in many cases they really don’t know what they want. They are just justifying their actions with Agile. Imagine starting to build the house on a base of 9×4 meters, and when you reach half way trough the finishing line, you change your mind and demolish the house to the ground. So, you start over with new house, this time on a base of 7×7 meters.

There is really no way to justify that with Agile and to say that you discovered along the way that house on a base of 9×4 meters is not what you really wanted. Definitely not Agile! At least initial idea should be defined with some initial research. Do your homework first. Demolishing something because you don’t know what you even initially want, is really a huge waste. And who doesn’t hate waste? I know, right?

There is a huge difference between being sloppy or lazy and Agile. Agile steps in after you already did some homework and you did it well. When this is finished, Agile can cope pretty well with any kind of project.

The lesson of this more business oriented story:

Don’t blame your failure on something or someone else. It’s always and only your responsibility to make something work.   Agility does not equal to the lack of responsibility, quite the opposite. If you do something and it goes well, take the credits. If you did something that fails, also take the credits for it.