Agile from first principles

Who It's For

Leaders, managers and project and digital leads working in public or voluntary sector organisations

Overview

Public services increasingly face uncertain problems, and the cost of learning too late falls on the people they serve. This first half of Built to adapt traces agile from Winston Royce's 1970 paper to the Agile Manifesto, then separates doing agile from being agile using Cynefin and the Stacey matrix. Scrum follows, from Schwaber and Sutherland's Scrum Guide, then Lean and Kanban with Ohno's seven wastes, John Seddon's failure demand and Little's Law. Experimentation draws on Eric Ries's build, measure, learn loop, then design thinking and the Double Diamond. It finishes on mission command, Team Topologies and psychological safety.

Aims

The purpose is to help leaders tell agile rituals from agile working, choose a method that fits the uncertainty in front of them, run small experiments safely in a public setting, and design teams around flow, clear intent and the psychological safety that lets learning happen early.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Diagnose the kind of problem in front of you using Cynefin and the Stacey matrix before choosing a method.
2. 2Write a testable hypothesis and design an experiment that is safe to fail, protecting safeguarding, legal duties and consent.
3. 3Set intent and boundaries for a team, and use Team Topologies and cognitive load to design teams around the service you want users to experience.

What you'll develop

Across this Explore, you will develop the ability to:

1. 1Explain where agile came from, including what Royce actually argued about the waterfall and how the Manifesto's four values work as cultural bets.
2. 2Diagnose the kind of problem in front of you using Cynefin and the Stacey matrix before choosing a method.
3. 3Explain how the three pillars of transparency, inspection and adaptation, supported by the five values, make Scrum's empiricism work.
4. 4Identify waste and failure demand in your own service, using Ohno's seven wastes and Seddon's distinction between value demand and failure demand.
5. 5Distinguish a pilot from an experiment, and use Ries's terms, minimum viable product, validated learning, pivot and persevere, precisely.
6. 6Explain what makes design thinking human centred, empathy driven and non-linear, and compare the Double Diamond, d.school, IDEO and IBM models.
7. 7Distinguish technical problems from adaptive challenges, and explain Bungay's three gaps and why the instinctive response to each makes it worse.
8. 8Compare points on the spectrum of team stability, and explain why stable, cross-functional teams that own a service suit work that keeps changing.