Moving Beyond Agile
The Agile Manifesto and the various tools and methodologies it has inspired, have been the driving force in making modern software development teams more efficient and effective. However, the list of principles in the original manifesto are deliberately addressing a specific context (developing software for external clients) and reacting to a specific approach that the authors disagreed with (process-heavy engineering methodologies). I think it’s time for us to create a new set of principles for data teams embedded in biotech organizations, addressing this new context and correcting the ineffective practices that we all hate.
Here’s why I think Agile isn’t enough:
In the two decades since the manifesto was published, the concepts of Agile have been adapted and applied to a much broader range of contexts from siblings like internal software and data science teams, to distant cousins like manufacturing. So when people talk about Agile today, they often mean a different, more general set of concepts that are common to all these situations.
These concepts are between the lines in the original manifesto. They’re deep and fundamental truths about how we work and interact. However, the more abstract they become, the harder they are to apply. In some cases they’ve been watered down to where anyone can claim to be doing Agile even if they’re using the exact types of methodology that the manifesto is railing against.
On the other hand, the more we go back to the original manifesto, the more we find things that make perfect sense in their context, but not in ours. Other things that are important in our context aren’t there at all, such as shifting process in parallel to developing software.
In this newsletter, I’ve tried to tease out some ideas that have worked in this context for me and others. But I think it’s now time to try to formalize them into our own list of principles, and I want your help. In upcoming posts I’ll be exploring ideas for what might be on this list. If you have suggestions or feedback, send me an email at scalingbiotech@substack.com or ping me on Bits in Bio Slack. I don’t know exactly what this will look like in the end, but I’ll make sure that everyone who contributes is recognized appropriately (unless they want to remain anonymous).
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