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Agile Values and Principles

Explore foundational values and principles to foster adaptability, enhance collaboration, and drive continuous improvement in your processes.

Understand and apply Agile Values and Principles based on first principles. Build a foundation for true agility and continuous value delivery

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Overview

Agile Values and Principles form the cornerstone of effective Agile practices, guiding teams in their pursuit of delivering value consistently and sustainably. These values prioritise individuals and interactions over processes and tools, emphasising collaboration, customer feedback, and adaptability. By adhering to these principles, organisations foster an environment where teams can respond to change swiftly, ensuring that the products developed are not only relevant but also aligned with customer needs.

This framework encourages a culture of continuous improvement, where teams regularly reflect on their processes and outcomes, leading to enhanced efficiency and innovation. The systemic nature of Agile Values and Principles enables organisations to build resilience, allowing them to navigate complexities and uncertainties inherent in modern product development. By embedding these values into the organisational fabric, teams are empowered to self-organise, make informed decisions, and maintain a focus on delivering high-quality outcomes.

Ultimately, the adoption of Agile Values and Principles is not merely a tactical shift but a strategic enabler that transforms how teams operate, fostering a mindset geared towards long-term success and value creation. This foundational approach ensures that agility is not just a methodology but a way of thinking that permeates every aspect of the organisation, driving meaningful change and sustainable growth.

Learn More about Agile Values and Principles

Guides

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

Discover more about Manifesto for Agile Software Development and how it can help you in your Agile journey!
Tags

Agnostic Agile

Agnostic Agile is a movement that promotes ethical, context-driven agility by prioritising principles over rigid frameworks. Championed by thought leaders like Arie van Bennekum, a Dutch signatory of the Agile Manifesto, it encourages practitioners to adapt methods pragmatically based on need rather than ideology. Drawing from diverse approaches such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, and XP, Agnostic Agile emphasises professionalism, critical thinking, and value delivery over brand loyalty or prescriptive practice.
Blog

Without Delivery, There Is No Value

Value in software is only realised through delivery. Frequent releases validate assumptions, reduce risk, and enable rapid feedback, adaptation, and continuous improvement.
Videos

Empowering Teams to Tailor Their Processes: A Path to True Agility

Explains why empowering teams to adapt their processes boosts agility, reduces waste, and fosters innovation, using real-world examples and practical steps for organisations.
Videos

Detecting Agile BS: Lessons from the US Department of Defense

Learn how to spot fake Agile practices using six key questions from the US Department of Defense, and discover steps to assess and improve true Agile maturity in organisations.
Blog

The Role of Agency in Scrum: Why Self-Management Without Agency is a Lie

Explains why true Scrum requires real team agency, not just self-management in name, and how lacking agency leads to ineffective, ritualistic Agile practices.
Videos

7 Deadly Sins of Agile: Greed

Explores how greed in Agile leads to overwork and reduced value, offering strategies for value-driven delivery, balanced sprints, team trust, and effective leadership.
Videos

Does Your Team Truly Understand Your Product Vision and Goals?

Ensuring every team member understands and connects their daily work to the product vision and strategic goals is key to true Agile alignment, collaboration, and value delivery.
Videos

Why does Agile focus on values and principles rather than a prescribed set of steps?

Agile emphasises values and principles to guide teams through complex, uncertain work, enabling adaptation and improvement where fixed steps cannot guarantee success.
Videos

How to Be an Effective Agile Coach: Agnosticism in Practice

Learn how Agile coaches can empower teams by staying framework-agnostic, focusing on core principles, and enabling teams to choose and adapt practices for their needs.
Videos

Ditching Agile Banditry: Why Story Points and Velocity Metrics Are Undermining Your Team's Success

Explores how relying on story points and velocity can harm Agile teams, advocating for objective metrics like cycle time and throughput to boost collaboration and transparency.
Blog

Searching for self-organisation

Explore the journey to self-organisation in teams. Discover strategies to foster accountability, identity, and high performance for agile success.
Videos

Redefining Agile’s Core: Beyond Rituals and Procedures

Explores how Agile’s true value lies in delivering outcomes and adapting to change, not just following rituals or procedures, and highlights the need for human judgement in complex systems.
Videos

Ditch the Agile Bandit Mentality: How to Prioritise Value Over Estimates for Team Success

Explores why focusing on value delivery and psychological safety leads to better Agile team outcomes than fixating on estimates, output metrics, or blame culture.
Videos

7 harbingers of the Agile apocalypse - Judgement

Explores how rigid, judgmental Agile practices stifle creativity and innovation, and advocates for principle-driven, adaptable approaches to foster true business agility.
Videos

Transforming Scope Creep into Success: Embrace Agility and Deliver Value in a Changing Market

Learn how to turn scope creep into an advantage by adopting Agile methods, focusing on value delivery, and adapting to changing requirements in dynamic markets.
Videos

Empowering Agile Teams: The Critical Role of User Feedback in Requirement Changes

Explains how empowering Agile teams to act on user feedback enables rapid requirement changes, improves product relevance, and overcomes barriers like rigid contracts.
Videos

Unlocking Agile’s Core: Questioning to Create Value

Explores how questioning, continuous improvement, and team empowerment drive Agile success, helping organisations adapt quickly, spot inefficiencies, and create lasting value.
Videos

The Power of Humility in Agile: A Core Virtue for Success

Explores how humility strengthens Agile teams by fostering trust, collaboration, openness to feedback, and better decision-making through reduced bias and data-driven insights.
Videos

The Fallacy of Equating Agility with Speed: What Agile Really Means

Explains why Agile is not about speed but about prioritising valuable work, adapting to feedback, and avoiding wasted effort to deliver products that truly meet user needs.
Videos

Introduction to Agility’s Ghosts: Shedding Dogma and Embracing Pragmatism

Explores the dangers of dogmatism in Agile, highlighting the need for flexibility, pragmatism, and people-focused adaptation over rigid rule-following in teams.
Videos

Empathy in Agile: Building Trust and Stronger Relationships for Success

Explores how empathy, trust, and respect strengthen agile teams, improve collaboration, reduce bias, and foster continuous improvement in organisations and with customers.
Videos

Overcoming the Plague of Rigidity: Embracing True Agility in Your Team

Explores how rigid adherence to tools and processes hinders true agility, and offers strategies for fostering adaptability, experimentation, and continuous improvement in teams.
Videos

Quotes: Less is More. True or False?

Explores how applying ’less is more’ in Agile boosts productivity and quality by focusing on high-value tasks, reducing waste, and streamlining team workflows.
Videos

Why Agile Success Lies in Principles, Not Tools: A Shift in Focus

Agile success depends on core principles like adaptability and collaboration, not just tools or frameworks. Focusing on principles leads to better decisions and lasting results.
Tags

Agile Strategy

Drive long-term success with Agile Strategy. Align vision, execution, and adaptability to deliver continuous value.
Blog

You can't stop the signal! But you can ignore it!

Explores why teams ignore clear signals from Agile and Scrum, highlighting how culture and fear hinder continuous improvement and effective problem-solving in organisations.
Tags

Agentic Agility

Agentic Agility is the ability for humans and AI to take intentional, adaptive action within socio-technical environments, enabling continuous improvement, value delivery, and organisational resilience. It transforms Agile, Scrum, and DevOps from passive execution into deliberate evolution, ensuring agility remains a living capability, not a hollow label.
Blog

Storms of Neglect The Perils of Not Delivering Usable Products in Agile Iterations

Failing to deliver a usable product each agile iteration leads to lost trust, technical debt, poor adaptability, misaligned expectations, low morale, and lack of feedback.
Videos

Special Sprints: Agile Banditry or Risk Management?

Explores why special sprints like Sprint Zero or hardening sprints undermine Agile by delaying work, increasing risk, and reducing continuous delivery of usable products.
Videos

The Overlooked Virtue of Agility: Diligence

Explores why diligence—consistent attention to quality and standards—is vital in Agile teams, how it’s often overlooked, and practical steps to foster it for lasting success.
Blog

There is no "do agile" there is only "be agile"

Discover why true agility is about being, not just doing. Embrace deep organizational change for lasting value in your agile journey. Learn more!
Blog

Evolution not Transformation: This is the Inevitability of change

Change in organisations is a continuous, evolutionary process driven by experimentation and adaptation, not a one-time transformation or fixed end state.
Videos

Say-Do Metrics: Avoiding Agile Banditry in Your Organization

Explains the risks of using say-do metrics in Agile, highlighting how they encourage vanity metrics, harm psychological safety, and shift focus from outcomes to outputs.
Videos

What are the top 3 things a Scrum Master needs to bear in mind when adopting the coaching stance?

Summarises the top considerations for Scrum Masters adopting a coaching stance: building trust, understanding team context, and leading through influence, not authority.
Videos

How to Achieve Predictability in Business through Agile Principles

Learn how Agile principles help businesses improve predictability by addressing challenges, optimising systems, aligning goals, and adapting to change for consistent results.
Videos

Empowering Agile Teams: Why Understanding Product Vision is Key to Success

Explains why agile teams need a clear understanding of product vision and strategic goals to boost alignment, ownership, decision-making, and adaptability.
Videos

How do you think Agile is evolving since its inception in 2001?

Explores how Agile has shifted from top-down management to decentralised decision-making, highlighting ongoing challenges and the move towards true organisational agility.
Videos

Unlocking the Power of Immersive Learning in Agile

Explores how immersive, hands-on learning helps teams internalise Agile principles, shift mindsets, and drive lasting Agile transformation through real-world experience.
Videos

Mastering Agile: The Power of "Just Enough and No More" for Optimal Efficiency

Explores how applying the “just enough and no more” principle in agile practices boosts efficiency, reduces waste, and helps teams focus on delivering real value.
Videos

Unlocking Success: How Small Experiments Transformed Feature Delivery from 25 to 150 in Software Development

Explores how breaking features into small experiments boosts software delivery, enabling teams to deliver more features, reduce risk, and improve customer-focused products.
Videos

The Evolution of Product Management in the Agile Era

Explores how Agile transformed product management by enabling shorter release cycles, faster feedback, continuous delivery, and a stronger focus on built-in quality.
Videos

How is agile product development different to waterfall project management?

Compares agile product development and waterfall project management, highlighting differences in decision-making, delivery, customer collaboration, and adaptability.
Videos

Unlocking the Power of Immersive Learning in Agile: Overcoming Cognitive Bias

Explores how immersive learning in Agile and Scrum helps overcome cognitive bias, promotes hands-on practice, and supports continuous improvement for practitioners.
Videos

How to Overcome Agile Banditry: A Product Owner’s Journey

Explains the pitfalls of micromanagement in Agile, showing Product Owners how to avoid “Agile Banditry” by focusing on vision, value, and empowering their teams.
Videos

The Pitfalls of Agile Burndowns: Stop Being Agile Bandits

Explains why relying on Agile burndown charts leads to over-planning and false progress, and advocates for minimal, adaptive planning and continuous value delivery.
Videos

Ditching the Myth of Special Sprints: Embrace True Agile Practices for Usable Products

Explains why relying on special Sprints undermines Agile, and advocates for continuous improvement, accountability, and delivering usable products each Sprint.
Videos

The Ghosts of Agile Past: Why Burndown Charts Might Be Holding You Back

Explores why burndown charts can limit Agile teams, highlighting the drawbacks of fixed planning and advocating for adaptability, empirical work, and value flow.
Videos

The Power of Kindness in Agile: A Core Virtue for Success

Explores how kindness, empathy, and compassion in Agile foster trust, improve team collaboration, and enhance customer focus for long-term organisational success.
Videos

Temperance in Agile: Why Less is More

Explores how practising moderation in Agile—by keeping backlogs lean, limiting work in progress, and focusing on value—boosts team efficiency and reduces waste.
Videos

From Control to Collaboration: How Project Managers Can Embrace Agility and Thrive

Explores how project managers can shift from control to collaboration, adopt agile mindsets, embrace uncertainty, and foster team empowerment for project success.
Videos

Unmasking Agile: How to Spot Genuine Practices Amidst the Myths

Learn how to identify authentic agile practices, spot common myths, and understand cultural barriers that hinder true agility in modern software development teams.
Videos

Conquering Sloth in Agile: 6 Signs Your Team Might Be Stalling

Learn to spot six key signs of sloth in Agile teams, including missed deliveries, ignored feedback, rigid processes, and lack of adaptation, to improve true agility.

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