As I mentioned in our previous blog, TriYoung, Inc. has adopted the Agile method and our team took each of our core convictions and presented on how it relates to the Agile way of thinking. When we had our presentation on “Efficiency: Great work in a timely fashion” we weren’t expecting for this core conviction to change but realized we had to if we were going to call ourselves an Agile team.
To understand why a change was needed, you must first understand our reasoning for moving to Agile. We want to value the Individuals and Interactions over process and tools. We want value working software over comprehensive documentation. We want to value Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation. We want to respond to change over following a plan. We feel moving to Agile will result in customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of useful software. This allows for sustainable development at a constant pace which means continuous attention to technical excellence and good design. With Agile, working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months) which means we begin building what is essential and will welcome changing requirements, even late in development.
Now that you understand why we moved to Agile, we will explain why a change to our core conviction of “Efficiency” was needed. The definition of Efficient (of a person) is working in a well-organized and competent way. We learned that if the focus is solely on being efficient, we will have great productivity but may miss out on the quality of product which comes with continuous improvement. We not only want to minimize wasted effort, but we want to be successful in producing the desired result. We researched and found the following article online
https://agilebacon.com/words-mean-things-efficient-and-effective/. This article highlighted how Agile and Lean principles have elements of effective (focus on delivering value) and efficiency (while minimizing waste). The feature image for our blog which also came from this source, highlights how high efficiency but low effectiveness can cause a project to die quickly. It also shows that low efficiency and high effectiveness is just survival. But with high efficiency and high effectiveness your project will thrive. This quote by Tony O’Halloran summarizes it perfectly, “If you’re only focused on going fast, you prioritize efficiency, but if you’re trying to focus on innovation, creativity and making sure you’re working on the right thing, you need to focus on effectiveness often at the cost of efficiency.” We now knew we not only need to be efficient but effective.
Lastly, we met to determine how we could add effectiveness to our core conviction of “Efficiency: Great work in a timely fashion”. We first identified our two key words Effectiveness and Efficiency both start with letter “E”. We decided to call the new core conviction “E2”. Then we identified our goal is really to work efficiently to provide effective services. With this information we proudly introduce our new core conviction which aligns with our newly adopted Agile methodology, “
E2: Efficiently deliver Effective services”.
