Sebastian Gräßl

Now, when I look at how companies trying to introduce "Agile" they try to use one standard template that everyone needs to adhere to.

And that doesn’t work.
…and it’s not Agile. It’s very stiff.

This worked. These companies were agile. Even the first one without any officially adopted practice. I’m leaving out a lot of details, but in short it was just everyone organising themselves and communicate on a forum where everyone participates. We tried different ways, and we kept what was working for us.

We had a similar arrangement at another company I worked for, but with Kanban, and we had a big board. And everyone had their little avatar with their work buddy on the task they were working on.

The next company I worked for was similar. However, we wanted to change and adopted some Scrum practices. Which boiled down to having a 15 minute meeting every morning where everyone briefly mentioned what they worked on yesterday and what will be worked on today.

We didn’t have planning meetings, not even a shared space to collect tasks. Everyone had their own little way of keeping organised and working. We knew what projects were due, and we kept our managers and sometimes directly our clients up to date on what will be done when.