Chapter 14. Reliable Innovation

In the end, the positive answers to two questions form the essence of Agile Project Management: “Are you delivering innovative products to your customers?” and “Are you excited about going to work every day?” Agilists want to build innovative products—products that test the limits of our abilities as individuals and teams—and create a work environment in which people, as individuals and in teams, can thrive.

Possibly the greatest barrier to becoming agile is dealing with the illusions of causality and certainty. In a production environment in which requirements and technology are relatively stable, we are better able to predict the future—to plan and expect conformance to that plan. However, as uncertainty in the external world increases, managers who have been successful in stable environments attempt to apply the same processes and performance measures to unstable environments. Their certainty—and the belief that if they just push hard enough they can “cause” the right results—is likely to result in failure rather than success.