What is Neo-Agile in SCRUM?
Motto: “Using Scrum terminology alone doesn’t make you agile”, “EXIN Agile Scrum Foundation Workbook”, By Nader K. Rad, Frank Turley
What is Agile (SCRUM)?
To know what is Neo-Agile we must understand what is Agile. In this article, I will refer to a practical part of Agile, SCRUM, the wildly used Agile framework. SCRUM is easy to understand and learn but quite difficult to put into practice.
Let’s suppose that we have a client that has a brilliant idea, he has money and is ready to invest in a product as soon as possible. If the development team will use a traditional approach — waterfall, it may be difficult to have an overview of the product in a short period of time. The client may not be able to answer the team questions, and may become exhausted by the planning phase and will eventually give up. And, why not, another person can have the same idea and lunch it on the market earlier. If the development team will use Agile, the client can see with his own eyes the product in a few months maybe even weeks. The client has the opportunity to be the first to lunch a product on the market and fish for customers even if the product is not a mature application yet.
I prefer to say that Agile is a methodology tailored for clients that do not know exactly what they want but they want it faster. These are not my words, they are of one of my fellow colleagues after he realized that his clients did not respond to his questions.
The SCRUM framework is simple but to keep it simple you must follow some rules and play some roles, Agile Artifacts. The Product Backlog is a list of features, a list of requirements, arranged after the Grooming process in a priority list. After a meeting called Sprint Planning, the Product Owner, Scrum Master and the development team, grouped in a Scrum Team, will select and order a shortlist of features — user and technical stories — that will be called Sprint Backlog. The developers start to work on those stories for a period of 2 up to 4 weeks — Sprint. To be Agile and synchronized in this process the team must have a 15 min meeting each day — Daily Scrum. At the end of the Sprint, the team will have a Sprint Review meeting and decide what features can be proposed to the client to be launched on the market — increment the product. Finally, the Sprint Retrospective will decide what went well and what was wrong in the passing Sprint period.
“Being Agile equals being agile, being adaptive and using a certain framework”, “EXIN Agile Scrum Foundation Workbook”, By Nader K. Rad, Frank Turley
What’s Neo-Agile?
The definition of Neo-Agile is very simple, it is the practical implementation of Agile, it’s what the Scrum Team managed to understand and retain from the theoretical part and decide to implement in their daily work.
The question that comes up is: Is Neo-Agile a better version than Agile? The real answer is that it’s not a right or wrong answer to this, in certain teams, it can be better, in other teams not.
To better explain, I will make an analogy with driving a car in the learning process and driving the car after you got the driving license. In my point of view, this is the best example.
The driving rules and the process to obtain a driving license are quite the same in all countries in this world. To obtain a driving license you must read and learn a book with all the rules. After that, you take an exam and if you pass you are free to go to drive your car along with other drivers.
The driving rules were thought of by the experts and upgraded according to real-life events and everyday traffic observation. Respecting the driving rules doesn’t guarantee that you will not have an accident but the probability to have an accident is diminished considerably.
The longer the Scrum Team remains in the SCRUM framework the better chances of success. This doesn’t mean that the team can’t break the rules in certain situations because of certain reasons, after all this is an adaptive behavior, but breaking the rules is a privilege reserved to the experts that have a good theoretical understanding of Agile and a strong practical reason to do this.
I will give one example of deviation from the Scrum rules that in my opinion is very bad.
The Daily meeting is the key point, the core of the Scrum framework, it is the developer’s socialization moment and synchronization time. The Scrum framework is very specific about this meeting, it’s just for the Development Team, it isn’t a status meeting for all the stakeholders. The presence of the Scrum Master and the Project Owner isn’t mandatory and it is better that they are silent listeners.
In Neo-Agile the presence and the intervention of the Product Owner in the Daily Meeting as an active speaker (in a meeting reserved exclusively to developers) or even worse the position of the Scrum Master and the Product Owner exercised by the same person is exactly like having the driving instructor or the examiner sitting next to you each day you go out by car after passing all examinations and obtaining the driving license.
In the example above, it will be difficult for the Development team to be self-organized: find their own way instead of receiving orders.
And finally, what is the right approach, Agile or Neo-Agile?
My personal answer is: That it depends, but for sure Neo-Agile is the path to move away from traditional Agile, in particular the Scrum framework, and miss the opportunity to understand and value its real potential.
