We work using agile development processes, which obviously needs the buy-in of internal users and project sponsors. But this jumped out at me when I read it. It’s from Carolyn McCall, Chief Executive of Guardian Media Group, which owns the company I work for. She was announcing a £15m investment in our digital business, and it was reported thus:

“What we’ve done so far is our own version of web 1.0, but we want to continue to web 2.0 and what comes after that,” Ms McCall added. “We need to be agile and ready to change.”

I suspect that phrase, “We need to be agile and ready to change”, is not a coincidence. You can trace a strong lineage between the agile development work going on in Guardian Unlimited and that little sentence in a speech to the OPA. Let me tell you how I think it got there.

A story of a sentence

A long time ago we began using agile processes in the GU tech team. It was a new way of working, but it seemed to address a lot of our problems — actually, the usual ones you get in most software organisations, such as knowledge silos, lack of flexibility, impossible deadlines, and so on. Changing what you know is always a tough choice, but the GU management team were very supportive of the move to agile.

In particular, our boss at GU at the time, Simon Waldman, was very interested in its implementation and evolution. (Simon’s since moved to GMG.) Over the months and years he enquired, queried, provoked, but was never less than encouraging and constructive. (At one memorable annual review to the GU staff Simon devoted an entire slide to explain how we had stealthily removed a problematic database table. Our DBA was thrilled; I have no idea what the attendant sales people and journalists made of it.)

And agile clearly worked for GU. One notable change was that planning meetings took on much more of a business focus. Far less about technical dependencies, much more on what functionality we wanted to release when.

And then we began we work on our new Travel site (released in November). It featured a new design and new commercial opportunties. More people around the company needed to scrutinise this as it started up, because it was a pretty big project and we had a much greater responsibility to be rigorous and transparent in our delivery. We saw agile methods as being critical to the work’s success. It would allow us to delay decisions to the latest possible moment and therefore produce something that was much more relevant — both editorially and commercially — to our audience and clients.

I therefore spent some time explaining agile to various company directors… but not as much as you might expect, because clearly the principles and practices had been discussed and understood well before. I ended up having the kind of conversations about agile development with non-technical senior managers that I wish I could have had with more technical job candidates. Word was getting around. The business people scrutinising the work on the Travel site understood the process’s business benefits, and they understood how the low-level practices would provide those, and they knew those practices were working successfully within GU at the time. And indeed, the project was blessed by the the company directors, including Simon and our MD at the time… Carolyn McCall.

You can see how that word “agile” has been thrown around a lot inside the company, and was — at least then — strongly associated with Guardian Unlimited and therefore its innovation (which I’d like to think is almost synonymous with “daily work” — ahem), and it’s stuck.

Now I can’t claim that Carolyn knows what, say, test-driven development really is. I suspect she has higher level things to think about. But if it came up, I think she’d understand our practices such as refactoring (making lots of tiny internal restructurings to produce a smoother, more manageable system), continuous integration (ensuring our changes are constantly integrated into the day-to-day work, not siloed) and retrospectives (frequent reviews and actions to improve). And, come to think of it, TDD, which is really about supporting and enabling change.

It seems Carolyn understands “agile” in a way that I wish more technical people would. It’s about change, and about supporting change (“We need to be agile and ready to change”).

The hard work starts now

And what of the future? Well, agile development helps us deliver responsibly to the business — and if someone invests £15m in you, then you really need to deliver responsibily. Again, that kind of investment only happens if there’s confidence in your ability to deliver. Can we offer that confidence? Well, just this week I was in a meeting with Tom Turcan, who is our Head of Digital Media Development. The conversation went something like this. Note that development for this particular thing is already about 30% of the way through:

Expert user: “…So in summary we’ve decided that features A, B and C aren’t that important after all, and we’ve replaced them with features J and K.”

Tom: “It looks like A, B, C total 7 ideal days, and J and K total 8.5 ideal days. So that’s a net increase of 1.5 ideal days. Is that right?”

Expert user: “Er, yes.”

Tom: “So we can’t really allow that to happen. We can make changes to make the work less, or keep it at the same level, but we mustn’t start increasing it. Can you find 1.5 days’ worth of features to remove?”

Expert user: “Yes, I should think so.”

Tom: “Okay, we’ll make a note to see what you’ve decided next week.”

We couldn’t have had that conversation in a more waterfall environment. By the time we’d have reached this point the groundwork for A, B and C — the database tables, the DAO layer, etc — would have been done, and it would have been wasted effort. Instead our expert user is able to make decisions later, and Tom is able keep to keep the work under control, giving the rest of the business the confidence it needs. Our agile processes enable that to happen. And all that is known by our developers, and by our managers, and that same confidence is shared by our group Chief Executive.

Postscript

By the way, there are other things going on this week in and around Guardian Unlimited. You might want to take a look at Jeff Jarvis’s commentary on Alan Rusbridger‘s commitment to digital and his interest in being flexible. Also, my esteemed colleague Neil McIntosh tells how GU saved a cat, and offers a word of advice to a researcher at News International.

As a friend said to me the other day, “I know when you’re busy at work — your blog goes quiet.” So back to work now.