VSAt Agileo, a fashionable digital start-up, we obviously love sport. Managers have only one word in their mouths when they work: the scrum, the “melee” in English. As in rugby, employees work as a team to win the match and win contracts. They follow specifications defined upstream by the client, a backlog, who will be the club’s shareholder in rugby. The team about to play is coached by a product ownerthe employee who represents the interests of the client closest to the field.
At the referee’s whistle, the ball is introduced by the “scrummaster”, scrum half, star player of his team. With each push, the players give their all and no longer listen to their principals: it’s the “sprint”, which marks the home stretch before a stage point, where the client can observe if the scrum advances or collapses. Our scrum is organised, mobile, powerful, but it is not soft and flexible, because its players are not gymnasts… Yet, paradoxically, it is “agile”.
The “agile methods” – including the very emblematic scrum – are among the magic words of modern management. They designate in fact an empirical approach, “iterative”, which makes it possible to approach a project in an efficient way. The computer of the 1990s gave birth to this way of developing software, which consists of regularly consulting the customer throughout the manufacture of the product, rather than scrupulously respecting specifications and painstakingly delivering a product. which could be disappointing, since not everything will have gone as planned. Here, each piece of project, test or step is a “sprint”a “iteration”and frequent round trips are made to correct any errors.
The symbol of managerial newspeak
At the origin, there is a text which officially founds this religion and gives it a capital letter: the Agile Manifesto, written in 2001 by seventeen entrepreneurs. It brings together innovative values and principles such as people, trust and transparency. The “agile culture” oversees a set of practices and rituals organized around the team and the client. To be correct, let’s take so “to Gilles” his famous method, and pronounce “edjayle”because you have to talk about Agile with a capital letter.
The methods qualified as agile are the concrete illustrations of the philosophy, which have found translations in the world of human resources, where they abound. Scrum and kanban are the most common names.
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