Agile versus agility

Adrian Dooley is a long-time project professional whose views on all things agile are much in demand from the project community.

In 45 years in project management, Adrian Dooley has seen many fads appear that later became integrated into the background of good practice. He believes agile will follow that same path. Starting out as a construction project manager, Dooley eventually became involved in developing software applications for construction. In 1984 he set up training and consultancy company The Projects Group. He is the founder of the Praxis Framework, a free online methodology and body of knowledge.

Q How have things developed with agile over the past 20 years?

A In 2001, 17 software developers got together to write the Agile Manifesto, and it was all about software development. There’s a perception that agile started with the manifesto, but if we drop the word agile for a moment and talk about agility – the ability to flex and be adaptable on your projects – there are numerous examples and case studies where people have had to stop, rethink, look again at the scope and head off in a slightly different direction – going all the way back to the Pantheon in Rome. So, I think agility has always been there. The only thing that started in 2001 was the hype.

Agility and flexibility are on a continuum. There are different degrees of agility, different degrees of flexibility, whereas ‘agile’ has become binary. There are these quite heated debates about what agile is or isn’t. One of my observations is that because people can’t quite pin down what agile is, they resort to the easier thing of defining what it isn’t, and that’s where waterfall comes from.

Q How useful is it to think of agile in opposition to waterfall?

A My advice would be to stop thinking in terms of agile and waterfall and to think in terms of a continuum of agility. It may sound very nerdy when I say that agile is an adjective and agility is a noun, but agile was an adjective to describe something you’re doing, so agile project management would have meant: “I’m managing my project with agility”. When it became a noun – when it became a thing – that’s when it became binary. You’re either agile or you’re not.

We’ve got to get away from that kind of thinking. I believe strongly that when we’re talking about how we want to manage our projects or our programmes, we should be talking about agility, because that gives us a whole spectrum of approaches that we can take not just on a project-by-project basis but on different parts of the project as well.

Agilists talk about agile projects and waterfall projects. Well, for anybody out there who’s worked on an engineering project, yes, if you are going to build a bridge, you’ve got to have the full requirements and specification done before you start digging holes in the ground, but the design work in the early stages of the project will have been done in a very agile way. There will have been multidisciplinary teams going through multiple iterations of the design, working with the client and stakeholders to gradually come to the design which is going to be built. You could have great agility in the design phases and very low agility in the latter phases because, ultimately, the ability to apply agility is down to the cost of change.

Q What’s next for agile?

A Ultimately, the profession is better for a lot of this discussion about agility. The next phase that we have to work through is about a lot of those ideas about agility just being absorbed as part of the profession, so that we don’t talk about them as being some separate way of managing projects, we just see them as a natural component – as part of the project manager’s toolkit.

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THIS ARTICLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THE SUMMER 2023 ISSUE OF PROJECT JOURNAL, WHICH IS FREE FOR APM MEMBERS.