The Knight bringing Agile to the Day

Once upon a time, a Knight challenged the King saying that we should provide people with what they need and not what we want to provide them. Instead of asking people for all of their needs now and not deliver until a year later, we should deliver their more important needs in shorter time periods to ensure we provide them with their needs sooner and then allow them to adapt to their needs as life changes around them.

The Knight learned that the marketplace and the customers therein drove the real needs. This gets to the heart of providing business value, value that the customer perceives, value that can change in this ever-changing world.

As the Agile Manifesto (the Knight's creed) says, Agile values working software over comprehensive documentation. Working software is where the customer sees the value. The “right” amount of documentation, neither too comprehensive nor too little, can lead us to working software more quickly.

Individuals and interactions have more value than processes and tools. This does not mean that processes and tools are not important, it is just that defined processes and tools should not determine how the individuals should interact to get their work done.

Customer collaboration is valued over contract negotiations since Agile values the continuous interaction with customers to ensure we are constantly reducing the risk and increasing the certainty of delivering what the customer really needs.

And finally, responding to change over following a plan allows us to adapt to change with collaborative control that ensures the change is both welcome, understood, and continuously validated.

Agile embraces change and accepts the fact that life is uncertain. By providing methods and techniques to minimize risk and increase certainty, this ensures we close the gap between what the customer actually wants and what we end up delivering.

With that, the Knight brought Agile into the day and people into the light.

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