What agility is not ?

Septembre 2008 !!! Still 5 years, since I wrote my last article on my blog about agility !

5 years ago, I decided to wrote a blog about agility. Agility in IT projects but also agility in every departments of a company and even in life. Since then, agility has gained awareness in some industries. Agility is seen as a key skill to be able to achieve some kind of demanding tasks. Nonetheless, there are still some confusion about agility and speed, about being agile and being dynamic or being reactive. There are of course some commonalities between these terms but there are far from being synonyms!

Some firms will ask you whether you feel yourself “agile” as a summary to “Are you polyvalent?” “Are you multitask?” “Are you working quickly?” and even “Are you able to work without precise guidance and to adapt yourself to new inputs every day?”. At the same time people who say “yes I am agile !” summarize “yes, I can learn something new”, “yes, I can slighty adapt myself and my way of doing thing if you train me”, and even “yes, I can use a hammer without crushing my fingers”. That’s a common misunderstanding: bosses use the word agility as a trendy word for modern slave where as employee use agility to please their boss and to say that they will be able in exceptional circumstances to evolve.

Now, we have a vague idea of what agility is not.

And if you ask whether it is agile to not write a single article about agility in 5 years. Even, if I am a little ashamed of it, yes it may be a proof of agility to forget an objective for more important ones !