Agile philosophy

AGILE is meant to make organisations react and adapt faster in an ever in-creasing complexity and pace of change.

The AGILE concept can be applied to all kind of contexts such as project management or company structure.

AGILE is not a method, it is a philosophy — a way of thinking and a willingness to achieve high customer satisfaction through excellence and quality.

AGILE can only work in organisations where common goal achievement is valued higher than individual goal achievement. It assumes that individuals cannot meet the demand and deal with the complexity of today’s world alone.

AGILE is not based on power, seniority or hierarchy — but it can be embedded. It removes rigid structures and uses team role assignments according to needs.

AGILE requires motivation, contributions, skills and expertise and thus is more demanding on the individual team members — but it employs facilitators.

AGILE understands, that organisation as a system is the key to success. An agile organisation systemically helps to achieve goals. As a result, dedicated people (agile masters) have the task to constantly help to improve the organisation as such.

AGILE provides methods to organise and scale team efforts based on a set of convictions:

1. Take a customer–service-provider perspective in all contexts.

2. Have mechanism for assigning people to tasks and not tasks to people. Apply pull instead of push.

3. Work in autonomous cross-functional teams instead of in functional silos.

4. Apply ownership approach. Owners are people who ‘own’ a product, asset, resource or task. They are the ones who make the decisions about them.

5. Expect leadership from everybody.

6. Let decisions in tendency be taken where the most information is.

7. Avoid bureaucracy. Build on trust.

8. Supervise progress with dashboards & measurements not with superiors.

9. Share all relevant information and apply radical transparency.

10. Work in iterations — always towards »done«. Limit work in progress.

11. Use constant feedback & review to step-by-step improve everything.

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