I’m coming to be of the opinion that if someone starts to seriously get to grips with process, within software development, project management, or knowledge work in general, eventually they end up sliding into the same set of grooves as everyone else who’s trying to do the same thing.

This, after all, is rather how agility was formed – from a set of best practices that no-one thought up, but that many had discovered.  When you do away with things that don’t work, and focus only on things that do work, lo and behold, you’ve rediscovered agility.

I’m aware that this might be bias speaking, and that I’m starting to see the world through agile-tinted lenses.  But it’s feeling more and more like another “aha” moment.  I’m starting to see agility as being a little like discovering that the Earth was round, that the Earth revolves around the Sun, a little like all great discoveries: that these discoveries are only controversial when viewed from the perspective of a previous widely-held misunderstanding.  But that once they are dis-covered, or revealed, or made distinct from the background in which they were previously immersed, then they are recognized as simply being better descriptions of the way things actually work.  In reality, not in imagination.

Any comments?  I want to give this a lot of consideration.