Everyone has their own experiences in different things and this is mine with the concept of Agile.
In School
The first time I learnt about Agile was through an elective module (for anyone who’s interested: IS4301 Agile IT with DevOps) in NUS back in 2017 which taught about Agile, devOps, and how these had and have been impacting the world of IT. In the module, we came up with a fictitious start-up idea, and begin running scrum on it; writing user stories, acceptance criteria, did backlog grooming. While we could not really run a daily standup (simply because we aren’t really running an actual start-up here), we did what we could to have a taste of the Agile way.
Through the events, we broke our idea down into bite size tasks, wrote down exactly & specifically what we want to achieve in these tasks, worked on a few of them every week, tracked each of them closely as we go.
After every sprint, we sat down and retrospected on what we could do better and at the same time, celebrate all the victories we had.
We were honest, open, inclusive, empowering, non-judgemental. The environment was safe. We embrace “failures” as objectively as we can as areas of improvement. It was an optimistic, forward-looking environment where we recognise how we can improve and what we did well. It felt like no matter how bad the situation may seem, I never felt alone, and we continuously focus on how to move forward better.
This fascinated me, all the stereotypical ideas & misconceptions about IT being a boring, dead, individualistic, long-houred sector for employees were challenged, and rightly so! While it opened my eyes to a possibility of a much more opened, lively, and manageable environment, I definitely needed more than an elective module to convince me so.
Perhaps our professor did realise that this was what we needed, so he arranged for us to visit his office.
In one of our lessons, we were brought to see first hand how Agile works in a real work life environment. We visited a bank’s IT hub where my professor was heading the Agile transformation strategies for. The office was unlike anything I imagined, it was open concept office; whiteboards everywhere, post-its all over, spacious environment, plenty of comfy areas to congregate and discuss conducively. I quickly realised how serious Agile is regarded in the real world, and that yes, it is possible.
My First Employment
Long story short, grateful till this day, i was able to secure my first job as a graduate joinee at this bank I visited (Lucky me)… In the 2-month long graduate program my fellow graduates and I embarked, we practiced scrum through forming a team ourselves to work on a short-termed development project, facilitated by a scrummaster, who along the way guided and taught us the way of Agile.
We called ourselves “screenslavers” (Inspired by the Incredibles Pixar movie) but also quickly changed to “breadscrumbs”. This was our team identity.
Scrum was easy to run, especially when we were a newly formed team of fresh graduates who knew nothing, so we practically followed everything we were taught to do. Every ceremony was ran religiously, “user stories” were created with sensible amount of details writtened, and we were disciplined in using our Atlassian tools to facilitate our interactions.
We ran relatively smoothly, however not one without conflicts…
However, it almost felt at times that conflicts are expected to happen, because our scrummaster would be cool as a cucumber no matter how terrible the issue(s) may be.
Calm and collected, our scrummaster would facilitate us to resolve our problems through continuous open communication.
Slowly but surely, week after week, we ran faster, more efficiently, it felt positive, forward-looking, everyone were helping each other as one cohesive team. There’s less focus of I and more of WE, and it was fun, like how my professor showed me it could be.
I quickly realised that this is a model of success I wanted to replicate anywhere I go next, and Agile is one way of doing it.
So this was how I got interested in Agile!
And now…
Fast forward to almost 4 years in the bank now, there were many many more learnings in my experience with Agile at work and outside. There were pleasant experiences, and plenty of challenging ones too, however through Agile, I felt people can feel more motivated, alive, and fulfilled, and my passion to bring spark to people around me is always ever burning strongly.
Hence through this blog, I intend to spread my experience, both Agile and non-Agile related, knowing someone will resonate with parts of my journey and find guidance in what they are facing no matter through work or life.
Finally, I thank you sincerely for reading. I hope this blog finds you well.
Originally published on Chang’s Journey, 29 May 2022.