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Agile or agility? A valuable addition to the project toolkit · Project Podcast

• 0:08
  Welcome to the IPM. Podcast, OPM is the childhood
• 0:11
  body for the project profession. My name is Emma DeVito and I'm
• 0:15
  the editor of project apm's quarterly journal, and your
• 0:18
  host. And this podcast, I'm speaking
• 0:20
  with Adrienne Duty, a long time project, professional, whose
• 0:23
  views, and all things are Darlin much in demand from the project
• 0:26
  community in his 45 years, in project management.
• 0:30
  Judgment. He tells me that he is seeing
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  many fads rise to prominence and then become integrated into the
• 0:35
  background of good practice. He believes our Joel will follow
• 0:38
  that same path. Just to give you a little bit of
• 0:41
  background and Adrian he started out his career.
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  As a construction project manager, eventually becoming
• 0:47
  involved in developing software applications for construction
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  in. 1984, he set up the projects group as a training and
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  consultancy Company and all things related to project
• 0:57
  management. Adrian was one of the Founders
• 1:00
  of project manager today magazine and also served as an
• 1:03
  executive council member of a p.m. he was lastly the lead
• 1:07
  author of the sixth edition of opm's body of knowledge, Adrian
• 1:11
  remains a non-executive director of a PN group and is also the
• 1:14
  founder and Lead author of the Praxis framework a free online
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  methodology body of knowledge and much more for project
• 1:21
  program and portfolio management.
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  Welcome agent. Thanks for finding the time to
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  speak to us. Thank you, Emma.
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  You've been in the world of project management since the
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  1970s a long time and no doubt have seen many Trends come and
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  go, could you give us a bit of background and context and to
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  how agile might fit into this post?
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  40 years? Yeah.
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  Well, I've been I think about this a lot and I've been
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  pondering the various fads and Fashions.
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  I've seen come and go. And perhaps the one that is, is
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  foremost in my mind, is the one that I sort of found myself in,
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  when I, when I first joined the profession and in some respects,
• 2:12
  it feels as if that particular fashion led to the one, we have
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  at the moment with agile, it was the very late 70s, and desktop
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  computers came along for the first time.
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  And those of us who were in planning and project,
• 2:30
  Management. Saw this is a great opportunity
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  and lots of people around the UK started developing software for
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  project scheduling so that they didn't have to send sheets off
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  to the bureau Mainframe. And wait for schedules to come
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  back usually with a typo in them, which made them completely
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  wrong. So, we started developing this
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  localized software so you could sit in the site office and do
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  your scheduling there and then it was real time, and Grew and
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  grew and the use of desktop computers, grew, and grew.
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  And, and just to give one illustration of how that became
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  such a thing. I remember an advert which was
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  for something called super project and it was a box
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  because, you know, those days software came in boxes, on
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  floppy disks and a manual. And it was a box sitting on the
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  Mastermind chair, and the caption was the best project
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  manager you'll ever meet. Now, we'd laugh at that.
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  Now, you know, the idea that a boxer, so, Software can manage a
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  project although maybe with a i it's getting there.
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  But in those days that was the hype around.
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  That particular tsunami of enthusiasm about the ability to
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  schedule projects locally on your desktop.
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  And I remember at the time, there was an enormous demand for
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  those of us who had experience in scheduling mainly from
• 3:56
  construction, from the IT industry and the it.
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  The street adopted this with gusto, I remember being called
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  into various organizations and they said, right?
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  This is this is what we're doing and I'd say well, doesn't really
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  apply to what you're doing, you know, I know it's a big thing
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  but this is not for you. This is this is not what you
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  should be or how you should be scheduling your projects and it
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  struck me on reflection that maybe that it's in some way.
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  It's the reaction against all that.
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  Hi type of project schedules which in some way led to the
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  opposite. Hype of.
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  No we don't need plans. We shouldn't have plans.
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  Everything has to be very, very flexible.
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  So in some ways you know the pendulum swings and one fashion
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  leads to an opposite fashion further down the line.
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  So agile came about at the turn of the Millennium and sauce that
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  the agile Manifesto from a very specific part.
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  Of wild and if you know specific sector industry, how has the
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  concept of agile changed since then since the agile Manifesto
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  came out and how has that morphed into something for the
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  world of project management? To use what we have to do is to
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  challenge some of the assumptions here.
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  So you're absolutely right was it 2001 its 17 software Ella
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  purrs got together in in a ski resort and said why we're going
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  to write this Manifesto and it was all about software
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  development and there's a perception that agile started
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  with the manifesto. If we drop the word agile from
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  moment and talk about agility, the ability to flex and be
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  adaptable on your projects, there are numerous examples and
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  case studies going back to the pantheon in Rome.
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  In the first century through Christopher wren's, Paul's
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  Cathedral where people have had to stop rethink.
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  Look again at the scope and head off in a slightly different
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  direction that that's nothing new.
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  So I think agility has all always been there and never
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  another example, would be in the 80s.
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  I think. Probably late, 70s and 80s.
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  Concurrent engineering was very popular and concurrent
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  engineering is about. Self-managed multidisciplinary
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  teams. So to think that agile started
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  in 2001, the only thing that started in 2001 was the hype.
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  The agility was already there the agile Manifesto crystallized
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  that perhaps as I suggested as a reaction to how the software
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  industry had somewhat unthinkingly.
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  It's so much stuff from construction which wasn't
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  necessarily relevant, but it was that Manifesto that started in
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  2001 and rapidly became something that I believe it
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  wasn't intended to be because of the hype.
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  What did it become then? Almost like a cult, I'd agree
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  with you and I'm probably would drop the word.
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  Almost I think. Yes, it's It has become a cult.
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  One example of that, is that agile has become binary.
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  You know, when I talked about agility and flexibility, you're
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  talking about something which is a Continuum.
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  There are different degrees of agility, different degrees of
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  flexibility. Whereas agile has become binary,
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  sadly something I I do quite a bit.
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  He's monitor all the conversations on social media
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  about this and you keep getting these debates among People who
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  are in the agile Community saying, well that's agile.
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  That's not agile. Particularly when it comes to
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  trying to scale agile across an organization.
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  If you look at this stuff on social media, for example on
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  LinkedIn, you will find there is quite a battle between the camps
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  that say safe, the scale. Agile framework.
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  Safe is not agile and other people will say, well, yes it
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  is. It's scaled added agile.
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  You'll get People debating whether scrum is agile or not,
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  that's a slightly different kind of argument.
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  But there are these quite heated debates about.
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  What is agile? What is not agile?
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  It's become binary. And one of my observations is
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  that because people can't quite pin down.
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  What agile? Is they resort to the easier
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  thing of defining what it isn't? And that's where waterfall comes
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  from because if we can't agree, what agile is?
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  So let's talk about what it isn't.
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  We don't have a name for what it isn't in the way that we have a
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  name for agile. So we need to create something
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  an antonym for agile. And that's where the term
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  waterfall comes from. And you will see some quite
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  prominent and respected. People will quote things about
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  waterfall or the other term that they commonly uses traditional
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  project management. So there's this idea that there
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  is this traditional project management.
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  IE every project previous to 2001 followed this traditional
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  approach and typically that is Is colloquially called waterfall
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  and I read or I read a transcript to a presentation of
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  a professor at a university giving a talk about a case that
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  the case study was the Empire State Building and the comment
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  was you develop all these plans? And if one resource goes sick or
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  it starts to rain or your plans go out the window, Now that's
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  just crazy that's not the way it works but the rigid rigid
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  waterfall approach which is you sit down.
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  You define everything. You produce an immutable plan
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  which can't change. And then you start delivering
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  according to that, plan is a say, a creation of people who
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  want to promote what they perceive as the opposite to
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  that. So you you you Can't have a
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  saint that doesn't have a dragon to slay and we're agile, is the
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  saint waterfall and traditional are the dragons that it seeks to
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  slay. So yes you're right.
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  It becomes very coltish out in the real world of projects.
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  It seems to me that people aren't so hung up on the
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  definition of a job. But just using what works and
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  there's two separate things here really, there's the mindset of
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  agility, the approach of agility which is what I'm understanding.
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  Ending from this. And then this is whole host of
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  agile tools that have been described as a child known as
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  that. Other that in reality, I think
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  people adapt experiment with whatever makes things work.
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  And when I've interviewed project leaders, often they go
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  for what's now been turned a hybrid approach.
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  Which actually is to have a toolbox that filled with all the
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  processes and techniques and everything you need from the way
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  projects have been done to incorporate new tools and ways
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  of thinking, would you agree with that out in the real world
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  of projects? Is it about this idea of having
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  a hybrid approach? I think again there's two ways
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  I'd like to approach that question, firstly, the
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  difference between what I've seen referred to as the agile
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  Just real complex. There is this interlocking
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  system of Consultants trainers tool providers in the agile
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  space who are slightly detached from the people who are actually
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  out there doing it and their interrelation their
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  interdependence on each other, just amplifies and amplifies the
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  message. And it's interesting when I post
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  on social media, about my views on on agile, I Will get.
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  I will get a lot of truly agile people saying, no, you're wrong.
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  That's not the way it works. And even say, blocking me on
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  LinkedIn, because they don't agree with the points.
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  I'm making. All the good conversations I
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  have are with people who are actually out there doing it and
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  saying, well, it's not that black and white.
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  We as you quite rightly point out, we adapt to the context of
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  our project will use tools and techniques which some will call
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  our Joel, some will call waterfall Locker somewhere in
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  between and we will use those as our project needs and those are
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  people are actually out there doing it.
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  So this is Act between the layer which depend on the hype, and
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  the layer that are just trying to do a job.
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  Now, when we then what that leads to and I think again, this
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  comes from the, if you like the agile Elite to the agile cult,
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  The Druids of agile, observing the people who are actually out
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  there doing it and say, ah, they're not totally agile,
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  they're not totally waterfall. So we'll call This hybrid.
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  Now my view on that is that if you look up the dictionary
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  definition of hybrid, which I haven't memorized, it is a
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  combination of two things by definition, the two things have
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  to exist in order to have a hybrid.
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  Now, my argument is that waterfall stroke traditional,
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  definitely doesn't exist and never did.
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  And agile is just one extreme if the Continuum of agility.
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  So if you don't have Waterfall and agile is just a view, a
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  superficial view of the underlying practice.
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  Then how can you have a hybrid of those two things for me,
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  hybrid is the acceptable face of the mistake that was made.
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  To make agile and waterfall these two polarizing positions.
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  What advice have you got for project professionals, who are
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  aware of all of this going on and aware of our child.
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  And perhaps thinking that that means a specific thing that they
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  need to be doing practically and with your longer view.
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  What advice would you give to them about agile to promote the
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  right way of thinking, my advice would be stop thinking in terms
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  of agile. And waterfall think in terms of
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  the Continuum of agility. It's going to sound very nerdy
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  when I say that a Giles and adjectives and Agility as a
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  noun. But yeah, Joel originally was a
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  was an adjective to describe to qualify something you're doing
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  so agile. Project management would have
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  been I'm managing my project with agility.
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  When it became a noun, when it became a thin, that's when it
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  became binary, you're either agile, you're not.
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  So we've got to get rid of that. We somehow got to get away from
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  that kind of thinking, and I believe strongly.
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  Foot when we talking about how we want to manage our projects
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  and our programs, we should be talking about agility because
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  that gives us a whole spectrum of approaches that we can take
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  and not just on a project-by-project basis but on
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  different parts of the project actually lists talk about agile
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  projects and waterfall projects. Well for anybody out there who's
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  worked on an engineering project.
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  Yes, if you're going to build a bridge, you've got to have the
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  full requirements and specification done before you
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  start digging holes in the ground, otherwise you've got,
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  you're going to have problems. But that design work in the
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  design, in the early stages of the project will have been done
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  in a very agile way or to use my preferred way of saying it will
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  have been done with great agility.
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  There will have been multi-disciplinary teams going
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  through multiple iterations of the design working with the
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  client working with stakeholders to gradually come to the design,
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  which is going to be built, so you can have great agility in
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  the design phases. Phases of a project and very low
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  agility in the latter, phases of the project, because ultimately
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  the, the ability to be agile, The ability to to apply agility
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  is down to the cost of change. And that comes back to where
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  this all came from, which was software development in software
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  development. If you want to change a feature,
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  you rewrite the code. Clearly there's a cost to that.
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  If you're halfway through building a bridge and you want
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  to change the design, the cost of change is enormous.
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  So within any project there are there are elements of the
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  project. There are phases of the project
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  where the cost of change is low, and that's where you can apply
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  great agility and there are areas of the project where the
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  cost of change is very high and that's where it's very
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  difficult. Well by definition, very
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  expensive to apply changes. So my advice to people is think
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  in terms of agility, think in terms of how different projects,
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  different parts of your project can make use of agility and
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  flexibility and then apply the relevant.
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  Approaches to those different projects different parts of
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  those projects just please please please get away from this
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  mentality that there's red which is agile.
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  Indigo, which is waterfall and all the other colors of the
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  rainbow in between don't exist. All the idea that hybrid is not
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  the colors in between hybrid is just a mixture of red and
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  indigo. So as sort of a muddy gloopy
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  Bluey read, you know, it's just need to open our minds to this
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  spectrum of agility. Where are we now with agile?
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  We've got past the hype. It's not idea that's been
• 19:25
  maturing in the world of business and projects and
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  Beyond. Where do you think it's heading?
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  Now own particularly from the world of project management, a
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  good Bridge just briefly going back to the manifesto.
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  I think what that did was to crystallize and formalize, some
• 19:43
  of the good ideas that were out there or L, help the
• 19:47
  formalization of the ideas. That are out there so you know,
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  I'm not trying to I don't want to come across as an antique.
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  Well, I suppose I am Auntie agile.
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  What I'm not is anti agility and I think the manifesto and some
• 20:01
  of the stuff around that has done a lot to help boost and
• 20:05
  understanding of agility in project management.
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  So I think that ultimately the profession is better for a lot
• 20:15
  of this discussion about agility.
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  And I think the next phase that we have to work through, is a
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  lot of those ideas about agility, just being absorbed and
• 20:31
  becoming part of the profession. So we don't talk about them as
• 20:35
  being some separate way of managing projects.
• 20:40
  We just see them as a natural component of managing projects.
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  They are part of the project managers tool kit.
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  When they come to deciding what tools are best for their
• 20:52
  particular project. Now I think again to to to draw
• 20:57
  another business analogy who talks about business process
• 21:01
  engineering anymore. But what does it was that was it
• 21:06
  Mike Hammer published an article in the.
• 21:10
  I don't know, the Wall Street Journal or the Harvard Business
• 21:12
  review or something. And all of a sudden everybody
• 21:16
  was talking about business process re-engineering, And then
• 21:19
  it disappeared. Did it disappear or did it just
• 21:23
  get absorbed into the general mindset?
• 21:27
  You know, I think when people talk about digital
• 21:31
  transformation now, You think well, how much of digital
• 21:36
  transformation is just business process?
• 21:38
  Re-engineering? In a digital world.
• 21:43
  And in a way, these labels are kind of a handy way of exactly
• 21:47
  what he says or crystallizing the kind of zeitgeist or a shift
• 21:52
  in the way we think about things often the way we think about
• 21:56
  business or the way we think about projects which is going to
• 21:58
  leave me to ask you another another question.
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  But already people are asking what is beyond agile?
• 22:05
  What is after, what comes after our child?
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  Probably four months ago. I wouldn't have known how to
• 22:12
  answer that question. Now I'm going to say a I you
• 22:19
  know we're all every people talking about AI for years I
• 22:25
  remembers when I first got involved in software development
• 22:30
  I wish I still had it but I remember buying a book on
• 22:34
  artificial intelligence. Most of it was sort of a bit
• 22:37
  over-the-top and and primarily it was just about well I
• 22:42
  remember an article in a magazine if I can get this.
• 22:45
  This quote, quite right there was two two phrases.
• 22:48
  It was time flies like an arrow fruit flies, like a banana, how
• 22:57
  do you explain to artificial intelligence the difference
• 23:01
  between those two sentences So the the thinking about
• 23:07
  artificial intelligence has been around since Turing.
• 23:10
  Proposed his famous test. What has happened in the last
• 23:15
  four months is chat GPT all of a sudden.
• 23:20
  Every other post in LinkedIn is about chat GPT.
• 23:24
  And what I see happening again is loads and loads of hype and
• 23:33
  I've Played with it in a very amateurish way and it does feel
• 23:38
  like it brings back. Those feelings from 40 years
• 23:41
  ago, when we first had desktop computers.
• 23:45
  What do you mean? We're like, excitement or yes.
• 23:47
  Yes excitement in that. This is life-changing.
• 23:51
  Well this is this is world changing.
• 23:54
  But at the moment, it's very clunky and the danger is that
• 24:01
  people get to in You see a stick about the clunky version?
• 24:07
  In terms of, it's finished its here.
• 24:11
  Rather than saying, why, this is a great start.
• 24:13
  Where can we take this in the future?
• 24:16
  So the hype says, it's here, it's great, you've got to use it
• 24:19
  now. The more balanced approach says,
• 24:23
  okay, let's let's have a look at this.
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  This is good. This is bringing a lot of stuff
• 24:28
  together. I can see this has opportunities
• 24:31
  but it's got to improve a lot and I'm sure it will over the
• 24:35
  next few years. So again, it's this danger of
• 24:40
  hyping it up too soon already people are talking about as
• 24:44
  possible application to the World of projects is that is
• 24:48
  that something you're willing to put your you know gives a give
• 24:51
  us some views on? I think it's early days my view
• 24:57
  of that particular tool chat GPT is governed by the fact that if
• 25:02
  I if I put a question in about something I'm not very familiar
• 25:05
  with, I get a very convincing very eloquent answer.
• 25:12
  That makes me too. Alright, that's how it works.
• 25:15
  If I put a question in about something that I'm very, very
• 25:18
  familiar with Did I get an answer back?
• 25:22
  Particularly if you put in questions about agile and
• 25:24
  waterfall, what we'll what you'll get back is very
• 25:28
  eloquent. Very convincing answers based on
• 25:33
  information. It's scraped from the web, which
• 25:35
  I would say, is completely wrong.
• 25:38
  So, one of the things that I think AI has to do is get to the
• 25:42
  point where it can somehow make a judgment about what is good
• 25:46
  information on what is bad information.
• 25:49
  I don't think it could well I'm but I'm pretty sure it can't do
• 25:52
  that at the moment. So when you start to see
• 25:55
  statements like all project managers are going to be out of
• 25:57
  a job in 3 years because we're just going to get AI to manage
• 26:01
  the projects while. Yeah.
• 26:02
  Come on, be serious. This is a this is another tool
• 26:08
  which is going to help. We've got to work out how to use
• 26:12
  it. We've got to work out how to
• 26:14
  understand it and then we've got a build it in.
• 26:19
  In to the way we manage our projects but let's be very very
• 26:24
  careful about not getting too excited too soon because then
• 26:28
  we're just repeating what happened with scheduling
• 26:31
  software in the early 80s when people people's attitude was you
• 26:37
  know the answer is your scheduling software.
• 26:40
  What's the question? And 30 years later, it was all
• 26:44
  the answers. Agile.
• 26:45
  What's the question? Let's not start doing the
• 26:48
  answers. AI, what's the question?
• 26:51
  Any leaving? Thoughts for listeners about
• 26:55
  agile and Agility? And I know it sounds like a very
• 27:00
  pedantic grammatical point, but it is actually just the surface
• 27:09
  presentation of a change in mindset, which is, we need to
• 27:14
  think about agility. Which is a Continuum, a spectrum
• 27:19
  of different degrees of agility and stop talking about binary
• 27:24
  Concepts like agile. And definitely opposing binary
• 27:30
  Concepts like agile and waterfall.
• 27:33
  Take a more relaxed considered holistic view of these things
• 27:40
  and don't get wrapped up in the hype and the jargon.
• 27:43
  Okay, Asian great way to end this podcast.
• 27:46
  So we've, we've covered a lot of ground there.
• 27:50
  Thank you so much for your time again.
• 27:52
  Thank you very much, Emma. It's been great fun.
• 28:00
  Thanks again to Adrienne for joining us and to you for
• 28:03
  listening to the OPM podcast. Don't forget to look out for
• 28:06
  more episodes or to rate and review as wherever you get your
• 28:09
  podcasts. We welcome you to get in touch
• 28:11
  with your comments feedback and suggestions by e-mailing us at a
• 28:15
  p.m. podcast at think publishing .co.uk.
• 28:19
  This podcast has been brought to you by APM to chartered body for
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  the project profession for More information on a p.m. visit, a
• 28:27
  PM. Org.uk.