2017-12-11 Dilemmas for the holiday season: Alcoholics Anonymous 10 steps, or the Agile Manifesto?

 
As Bill sees it
It took my some effort to come to terms with AA's 12 steps:

Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous

The set of guiding principles which outline a course of action for tackling problems including alcoholism, drug addiction and compulsion.

Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Step 4: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Step 5: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Step 6: Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

Step 7: Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

Step 8: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step 9: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Step 11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

http://www.hazeldenbettyford.org/articles/twelve-steps-of-alcoholics-anonymous

 

As Agile sees it
Now I have to come to terms with Agile's 4 "core values" and 12 "principles", which appear even more difficult to swallow...

Agile Manifesto

The Agile Manifesto, also called the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, is a formal proclamation of four key values and 12  principles to guide an iterative and people-centric approach to software development. 

Agile software development focuses on keeping code simple, testing often and delivering functional bits of the application as soon as they're ready. The Agile Manifesto was created as an alternative to document-driven, heavyweight software development processes such as the waterfall approach. 

The four core values of  agile software development as stated by the Agile Manifesto emphasize:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
• Working software over comprehensive documentation.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
• Responding to change over following a plan.

The 12 principles laid down in the Agile Manifesto have been adapted for managing a variety of business and IT-related projects, including business intelligence (BI).  They include:

1. Satisfying 'customers' through early and continuous delivery of valuable work.
2. Breaking big work down into smaller components that can be completed quickly.
3. Recognizing that the best work emerges from self-organizing teams.
4. Providing motivated individuals with the environment and support they need and trust them to get the job done.
5. Creating processes that promote sustainable efforts.
6. Maintaining a constant pace for completed work.
7. Welcoming changing requirements, even late in a project.
8. Assembling the project team and business owners on a daily basis throughout the project.
9. At regular intervals, having the team reflect upon how to become more effective, then tuning and adjusting behavior accordingly.
10. Measuring progress by the amount of completed work.
11. Continually seeking excellence.
12. Harnessing change for competitive advantage.

See also: agile project management, kaisen, Scrum