Psst, this is your conscious, I am here to remind you about something you have thought about, but then hid away in the back of your mind. Lots of this agile stuff is hypocritical, it preaches evolution and change, but then we ask the same old three questions at standup every day. Also, why must we have standup every day, isn’t that kind of prescriptive? Agile methods are supposed to facilitate innovation through iterative development followed by inspection and adaption. They practice the scientific method of measurement and feedback on products and team work; so why are the agile practices themselves magically exempt from this precious evolution?

I believe there are two main reasons; first off, it is to protect inexperienced agile practitioners from themselves. With a free rein to morph product and process there is a strong likelihood that by six months into a project the practices followed by the team would have deviated from the proven and tested methods of most successful teams. The risk of failure would increase and every project in a company would be using a radically different approach making integration, scaling and team member transfers a major problem.

The other reason is a little more sinister. Most of the creators, proponents and promotors of agile methods have interests in keeping the methods pure vanilla. This is so they can create training courses, certifications and web sites for them. While scrum, as one example, has its specialized ceremony names and products you can neatly market services for it. If you allow or encourage people to change it then the result is not so proprietary and more difficult to defend, promote and assert ownership over.

I am not suggesting we should be changing agile methods willy-nilly, I think a basic suggestion to try them out-of-the-box for a couple of years is sound advice. However, beyond that I believe there are great opportunities for growth and deviation outside the standard agile models for stable teams who want to evolve further. This article tells the story of one team that did just that and what other people can learn from it.

This month’s theme at ProjectManagement.com is “Strategy Alignment/IT Strategy.” This can seem at odds for agile teams who organically grow solutions towards evolving requirements. Where’s the strategy in that, and how do we promote empowered teams while preventing chaos? Most organizations spend considerable time and effort developing strategic roadmaps and they don’t want this work undermined by unordered development.

Fortunately, hope is at hand with some well proven models. While the common kernel of agile practices make little mention of strategy or architecture, many of the supporting guides and scaling approaches handle the topic well. So, when faced with a criticism of no place for IT strategy or struggling to link an existing strategy to an autonomous team we can turn to these agile “wrappers” for inspiration and guidance.

You do not have to be using these approaches as standards at your organization to make use of the integration points and approaches they recommend. Instead see how strategy and architecture are handled and then apply a similar approach in your project and organization.

DSDM

Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) is an agile approach that started in Europe and covers a broader project lifecycle timeline than most agile methods. It starts early with Feasibility and Business Study phases goes beyond deployment to handle Post Project work. Unlike most agile methods that don’t mention architecture DSDM has an architectural deliverable called the System Architecture Definition (SAD) that is created early on in the Business Study phase.

Agile projects struggling to appease architecture groups and facing criticisms of lacking strategic alignment, could look to the DSDM System Architecture Definition as a template for an early project, light-weight solution. DSDM also fits well with The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) standard and there is a White Paper on DSDM and TOGAF Integration White Paper here.

SAFe

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a knowledge base for implementing agile practices at enterprise scale. It presents this information through a Big Picture View that shows how the work of agile project teams can be rolled up into programs with their own program backlogs. Then explains how programs fit into larger portfolios that implement product investment and strategic themes.