Recently I read an article about Agile by my colleague Cosima’s suggestion. In the article I am impressed by the following image;

This image alone, shows why some of the companies failed to adopt agile. Every company almost instantly adopt Tools & Processes, Practices. Even though visualizing the work and the progress with materials is valuable, the things that we can’t visualize provides more value.

Incidentally, next day I had an internal training about agile basics. The teams I worked over the years used agile methodologies, so at the start of the training I have expected to hear things I already knew. I expected teachings like how to plan sprints, how long sprints should be, retrospective meetings, so on and so forth. But, the training was completely about agile mind-set and that’s all we need to learn at the beginning. The training didn’t define any implementation like Scrum or Kanban, since they depends on teams’ need.

We had great exercises about importance of transparency, communication and most importantly self-organization. Most important outcome for me was about self-organization. In the exercise, self-organization exponentially decreased the necessary time for the project -exercise in this case-. Most importantly, with self-organization people strived for the best, but without it they settled for what they have. Of course, self-organization culture is hard to achieve, but definitely possible with transparency, communication and safe environment.