In our work with clients we come across organisations and internal champions of Agile practices who understand this very important concept: Agile is about practices and behaviours. Practices and behaviours that enable teams to improve and succeed ultimately save money and increase delivery. We also occasionally run into people who are hoping for a project delivery mindset that is far more command-and-control than team-enabling under the guise of Agile. Agile “by the book”, or Agile by numbers, is command-and-control based and command-and-control, when turned on product development, is Not A Good Thing.

Here’s the deal: command-and-control approaches will destroy your projects and decimate your portfolios while you’re waiting for results that will rarely surface. If you dictate process to a project team you will get a team who can adhere to process and will be able to demonstrate all sort of reasons for failure relating to the project. Dictating process amounts to telling a team what to do, when and how. In this kind of environment the PM learns to allocate tasks, determine their order and execution and control which practices the team can or can’t adopt. The team learn to follow instructions and success depends on the PM being able to control everyone in the team to the right level. While this can happen in pseudo-Agile settings, it’s more common in waterfall environments. It can lead to success of a sort, but isn’t repeatable and is very much personality driven.

Where does the high cost of failure come in? In a waterfall or control-based Agile-like process, the PM can report that the project is under control while they work hard to plan and dictate tasks, interactions and processes to the team. A waterfall or control-based Agile-like process will demand an entire cycle of the process before failure becomes apparent, meaning that the available time and money have been spent before a project’s financial sponsors are aware of an issue.

If these structures and behaviours lead to hiding waste through confusion, properly enabled Agile teams eliminate waste through transparency.

The alternative is to enable teams: if you enable the team to tackle product development and guide them with good starting practices, they will adapt and improve as they succeed and typically deliver great and innovative products. Enabled teams understand that they are jointly accountable for delivering a good product and that they need to collaborate to reach the end. Agile coaches and facilitators who assist these teams know that their job is to guide and challenge the team, ultimately making sure the team has everything they need to succeed.

Agile is not about following a process, a check list or a flowchart. Agile is about Done, about completion and about products being more important than processes. Organisational adoption of Agile is about enabling teams, coaches, facilitators and managers to view the team as a vehicle for successful product delivery.

Shanan Holm is Projects Director and Agile Consultant at 3months.