Agile GLUE

In my last post I was writing about Fixing Flows, which was just an example answer to GLUE diseases. What I literally always try to apply is the agile manifesto:

 

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

 

The first line is a key concept of GLUE. I put the individual person and the interaction with people in the center of GLUE. A person makes the difference, not the process or tool at hand.

 

 

What really wonders me sometimes is the obsession (or tribal wars) between different so called agilists which method is the best. I am not a native speaker, but I believe that the sentence "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" translate into that a discussion about the method or tool set is the wrong discussion if in doubt. So talking about SCRUM or Kanban (both processes or tools) is just the wrong discussion. Talking with the individual person and interact with the person is more the right thing to do. Applying SCRUM and Kanban is therefore a good thing to do (as many other concepts), but talking about it is a complete different story.

 

The second line is a concept which I personally find to narrow minded, so I have enhanced it in my own thinking towards "Working solution over comprehensive documentation". The whole focus of GLUE is to get things delivered. This is reflected in two dimensions. First of all the GLUE Disciplines and then the GLUE Divisions.

 

Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation is a concept which is only briefly covered in GLUE. The Roles and Responsibilities describe how the (artificial) roles are in their deliverables dependent upon each other. But what really matters here (again) is the customer or better the person behind the customer. Contract negotiation is in my mind just a tool to get an agreement in place. Therefore the third line seems to be pretty much the same statement to me as line one and therefore I apply the people centric thining and working with the customer as much as with anyone else.

 

Responding to change over following a plan is the last change and I try to tackle that by looking at the GLUE Space as a circulatory system. The faster the flow is circling through the system the higher the capability is to react to change.

 

 

To keep it simple I do not try to press in a specific method or tool which claims to be agile into the concept, but just apply the agile manifesto itself. Comments are more than welcome.