Agile Gyan’s Post

I loved it. You provided new vocabulary to expand the binary of Agile/Waterfall to a much more informative and comprehensive model. It was much needed. This should spark some good conversations in our community.

This is a great impulse, Jurgen! And though there's a lot of overlap with Cynefin (you may want to explore that overlap in a longer version), at least I have never seen these two axis used for categorization. Some thoughts while reading: - "Managerialism" did not speak to me, because you need an organizational support in all four quadrants and people who take accountability for this infrastructure - aka "Managers". Have you considered using something like "Determinism" instead? - Likewise "Typical" is a weaker word than the other three. What about something like "Premiere" or "Launch (of a ship)"? - There is no path *towards* Typical, which is in surprising contrast to the otherwise neutral attitude you take to any of the approaches. If that is by intention, an explanation might be helpful - Your statement that TPS doesn't tell anything about design may be misleading. After all, Toyota built Lean Development which offered gems such as Set-based Design Hope that helps

The agility paradox is that sticking perfectly to agile is too rigid and so it’s not really agile 😀. Agility should be a way to reach a goal and not a goal itself, so for me the best agility is the one which works better in a specific context in a given time, not the one which sticks perfectly to a maturity framework.

No organisation is 0% agile, no organisation is 100% agile. Every organisation in the world is somewhere in between and can only strive to be be more agile.

Nice differentiation! Very helpful. At the end, the best agile transitions are the ones that are applying Agile principles without becoming dogmatic. Introducing an agile approach by the book is usually not that successful, unless people really think through how agile principles can be applied to their environment. And the result is sometimes different from what you may expect in the beginning. Independent of the specific approach it remains crucial to focus on actionable continuous improvement. That in itself will lead to an agile way of working. Gotta keep questioning the status quo! There are good practices. But not best practices, because they may not be best anymore tomorrow!

I wholeheartedly agree. For many years, in trainings, I've been speaking of "shades of grey" between overlapped waterfall (since pure waterfall rarely exists in nature) and the typical agile (i.e. Scrum like). In the middle, we found things like "plan based, with incremental delivery" or spiral-esque stuff (iterate until risk and uncertainty is acceptable and do a more plan-based approach afterwards). Also, in recent years we have become prisoners of "Agile with a Capital A" meaning the mandatory usage of "agile approved concepts" (from Sprints to OKRs) instead of what's best for each case. Great post!

...a train tunnel that’s 99% complete is still not a tunnel but merely a long and expensive dead end. 😂

Liked it. Perhaps also a suggestion to link this model to the Cynefin model. That can help you choose the most appropriate problem-solving strategy.

Refreshing to see that SAFe isn’t Agile 🥸. And the picture of the train… I see what you did there 🤣