Beyond Agile – Agile Ways

Beyond Agile Booklet

This is the second booklet in my agile musings series: Beyond Agile – Essays on Effectiveness, Flow, and the Limits of Methodology, and it captures my views on how the actual state of Agile can be improved at the organizational level. It contains a series of essays and posts that invite the reflection about ways to leverage the agile philosophy and ways if thinking.

Beyond Agile Booklet v3 Download

The Agile Orthodoxy Trap

Agile methodologies promise flexibility and responsiveness, yet many organizations find themselves trapped in rigid adherence to agile “correctness” at the expense of actual effectiveness. This phenomenon—where doing agile “right” becomes more important than achieving business outcomes—represents one of the most pervasive challenges in modern software development.

Push, pull, or flow

The optimum depends on your context, but flow-based systems generally perform best for knowledge work and software delivery. Here’s why:

How Technical, Product, and Organizational Debt Interconnect

Most technology leaders are familiar with technical debt—the cost of choosing quick and easy solutions over well-designed ones. But technical debt rarely exists in isolation.

Guesses, Dreams, and the Hard Truth in Software Development

“Estimates are guesses. Deadlines are dreams. Shipping is truth.”

This brutal axiom cuts through the comfortable illusions that plague software development. It’s a wake-up call that forces us to confront the gap between our plans and reality.

Building Solutions Through Trust and Empowerment

At its core, Agile isn’t about ceremonies, frameworks, or tools—it’s about trust. Trust that teams closest to the work know best how to solve problems. Trust that given autonomy and clear objectives, people will deliver meaningful solutions. This fundamental shift from command-and-control to trust-and-empower transforms how organizations approach complexity and uncertainty.

A Guide to Velocity, Predictability, and Innovation

Every engineering leader faces the same fundamental challenge: how to build great products quickly, reliably, and creatively. After years of observing high-performing teams, three principles have emerged as the foundation of engineering excellence. They’re quite simple, but their implementation can transform the organisation.

How to Structure Teams and Products for Speed

This post is inspired by the problems encountered coaching a solution delivery stream where Conway’s law was in practice: there was a lack of alignment between product architecture, organisation structure, and development teams.

Leading with Clarity: Beyond Agile’s Process Obsession

Agile has a problem. After decades of frameworks, ceremonies, and consultants, we’ve created something the original manifesto was meant to destroy: heavyweight process that obscures the actual work.

The Far Side of Agile

When Methodology Becomes Dogma: A cautionary tale of how the methodology meant to liberate teams can become their prison

The Agile Manifesto was revolutionary when it emerged in 2001. Its authors rebelled against rigid, documentation-heavy processes that stifled creativity and responsiveness. They championed “individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and “responding to change over following a plan.”

Fragmentation kills flow

Fragmentation is particularly devastating in software development because coding requires building and maintaining complex mental models that are extremely fragile. Here’s how fragmentation kills flow in development contexts.

Agility is All About Keeping Your Options Open

Agile software development works because it follows a simple principle: keep your options open as long as possible. Every iteration, user story, and daily synch is designed to delay big decisions until you have better information.

Agile Delivery Through Value Streams and Lean Flow

Organizations need more than just agile méthodologies to succeed in fast-paced business environments—they need a systematic approach to delivering value continuously and predictably. The key lies in understanding how value streams, lean flow principles, and embedded feedback loops work together to create truly responsive delivery systems.

Building business increments

This blog captures a conversation had with some delivery teams that were caught in a release framed delivery continuum and their quest to deliver meaningful value.

The conversation was triggered by a statement I threw at them and the questions that followed.

Governance Principles

Governance include the fundamental guidelines, principles and practices, that ensure an organization or team operates effectively, ethically, and in alignment with its strategic objectives.

Constraints, dependencies, and impediments

Knowledge work is characterized by cognitive complexity, creative problem-solving, and intellectual value generation. The challenges in this domain are primarily intangible and systemic.

Expanding the horizon of “beyond agile” practices

I first described the beyond agile idea in terms of leveraging concepts of Lean, Flow and ToC. I now expand this idea through the use of Encapsulation and Orchestration, as well as Real Options.

Team Capacity and Focus

Team capacity and focus are interconnected elements that determine a team’s effectiveness and productivity. Capacity represents the total potential work a team can accomplish, considering individual skills, available hours, and organizational constraints. Focus is about strategically directing that potential towards the most important objectives, minimizing distractions and creating a shared sense of purpose.

Maximizing Team Efficiency through Lean, Flow, and Theory of Constraints Metrics

In the context of modern business, delivery teams are constantly seeking ways to improve their performance, reduce waste, and deliver more value.

It’s Not About Being Agile, It’s About Being Effective

Today many people mistakenly believe that simply being “agile” is the secret to success. However, true effectiveness goes far beyond methodological buzzwords or trendy productivity frameworks. This exploration delves into a holistic approach to achieving meaningful results by focusing on fundamental principles that drive genuine productivity and personal growth.