Recently, people have voiced serious concerns about the wording of the Agile Manifesto, and whether or not Lean principles are more palatable to business.

I've always felt that Lean Software Product Development and Agile processes went together like bees and honey, so I took another look at the Agile Manifesto. I have little desire either to defend or to dismiss the positions taken in that document. Rather, I found the comparisons to be based on misunderstanding.

People Over Process?

The controversy focused primarily on this quote from the Manifesto: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools." There is strong wording pointing towards "one over the other" throughout the Agile Manifesto.

Granted, at the bottom of the Manifesto is this disclaimer: "...while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more." But it does come at the end, after the damage has been done. It's like the phrase "...and I meant that in the most loving way."

From the standpoint of most businesses, I'm told, favoring people over process would be a naive approach. "Both should be considered wisely." Who could argue with that?

So why was the Agile Manifesto worded so strongly?

Literally Speaking

In one sense, Lean is about generating profit by keeping the organization healthy (ed - we also talk about Lean as being focused on delivering value to the customer quickly - fast, flexible flow. Healthy organization; healthy process; appropriate quality; satisfied customer). Agility is about building robust software that does what the business needs it to do. Bees 'n' honey!

The Lean message is the right message when addressing people in the higher echelons of the business hierarchy. It is also the right message to start out with when talking to developers and managers. The whole organization needs to see how the health of the organization is their responsibility, and that such health generates rewards throughout.

Was the Agile Manifesto intended as a recipe for succcessful product management? I doubt it. It is a "manifesto" after all, not a playbook, prescription, or recipe. A lot of folks in our industry (executives, and we instructors, included), often take these things far too literally. There are still forms of discourse beyond contracts and procedural documents, right? At least, I hope so.

Such documents have to be read differently. Certainly they were intended to affect business, but business was not necessarily the audience for the document. The Agile Manifesto provides considerations. It can give an organization some important hints about its own values.

The manifesto was written by and for a community of practitioners... not to be used as a sales pitch. It is for people who re seeking to understand deeply.

A matter of Mutual Dependence

The Manifesto uses the word "value" - "we value people over process." But this is not an either-or dichotomy. It does not mean that we should value people but not process. Rather, it is probably better to see it as an indication of focus, one affecting the other. I believe there is a mutual dependence, focusing on the one helps the other be more realistic, appropriate.

A nice example of this tendency to (albeit geek-centric) of this type of perfectly valid, but vaguely paradoxical advice comes from the Gang of Four: "Favor aggregation over inheritance." This is one of the key lessons of the Gang of Four Design Patterns book, yet almost every pattern in the book contains one or more inheritance relationships. When we favor aggregation, we get more appropriate hierarchies.

Perhaps in the same way, when we focus on people, we get more realistic process.

The process must work for people, and be workable by people, otherwise it has no chance of working at all (unless step #1 of the process is "invent intelligent robots to replace developers"). Waterfall-style processes often ignored the realities of human nature, or suggested that we alter our behavior and "fix" ourselves for the sake of the process and the organization.

By comparison, Agile processes thrive on human nature.

Born from the Bursting Bubble

Communication is a relationship, and part of the responsibility for our confusion lies with the authors of the manifesto. Yet when I read the manifesto, I have to keep in mind that it was written five years ago. For a movement that has been around for a little over ten years--in an industry that's been around for at most 50 years--five years is a significant passage of time. The manifesto authors essentially coined the term "agile" as it relates to software development processes. Maybe this old web page is due for an update?

To me, the manifesto reads a bit defensively. There's a little bit of an "agile rebellion" encoded within. Again, this was 2001: The dot-COM bubble continued to collapse, and developers were working 50-80 hour weeks to prop up business plans that were often dubious. Or laughable. (C'mon. Who really thought that people would buy big bags of pet food on the internet?! Having lots of venture capital is not an excuse for wasting it.)

We must keep in mind that executives have great power, and responsibility, over the direction and health of the organization. One of the best ways to do that is to keep a majority of the people at the organization engaged and fulfilled by the work they're doing. The manifesto was the community's way of reminding business that when the going gets tough, it's time to get back to basics.

This may seem obvious, or quaint: Organizations really are made up of people; not procedures, processes, hierarchies, or any other form of abstraction (useful or otherwise) that you can name.

If "what we've always done" wasn't working well during the dot-BOMB, then let's by all means shake things up and re-examine our young profession. Business innovation has never been about sticking to "what we've always done." We need only look at the steel industry or the auto industry to see how faulty our natural tendency toward rigidity can be.

The Agile Manifesto is a reminder of what has real value to the organization, and of the responsibilities that all members of the organization have toward each other, and toward those values.

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