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I was at an Agile Academy Meetup last night and the topic was “The Agile Journey and beyond”. It was great to hear about the Agile concepts and practices being applied, in real-world scenarios – small and large organisations. But it was equally great to hear about how these organisations were using Agile in the way I think it is meant to be used – not as a rigid framework, but as a guideline for an approach. All three of the speakers made a comment like this (please note that I am paraphrasing here) ….” We tried XYZ and it worked for a while, then it stopped working so well, so we changed it”. Another speaker said “we tried the 3 questions at the standup, but it did not work, so now we “walk the wall”. I was really excited to see this extension of agile practices and acknowledgement that the practices that we see, read about and talk about so widely are totally malleable and able to be modified to suit each and every organisation. But there is a gotcha! All of the modifications came as a result of trying the “proper” way of implementing the practices, and then careful and comprehensive understanding of what about the practice did not work, and why, and then careful and incremental changes to the practice to make it work better. It was described best by one of the speakers as “an agile implementation of agile”.