Agile Is Not New, But It is Useful

Agile advocates are often quite quite siloed in their thinking, many having had little other experience of delivering projects than bespoke software development projects. Many of them are not even aware of the historical trends before the publication of the Agile Manifesto or that they are in fact just participating in an evolutionary trend, rather than a revolutionary approach. Agile owes much to Rapid Application Development or RAD (its immediate predecessor). Often, I have heard them musing about applying Agile to other technologies and industries and wandering whether it is possible. At the same time they miss the fact that DevOps, which extends Agile, is based on manufacturing theory (Total Quality Management, Just-In-Time and Flexible Automation).

Actually, project managers who subscribe to the AgilePM approach, will often use the organisational aspects of agile to run their projects and the approaches used in RAD were not new either. Prototyping was a feature enabled in manufacturing by the use of CADCAM to rapidly design and produce prototypes and Engineers have always been taught that Design is an iterative process. The concepts of Design Thinking originate from academic papers produced in the 1960s, and address many of the technique aspects of Agile including multi functional product teams and evolutionary prototyping and development of innovative products.

But if you want to see Agile organisational constructs such as sprints in action, go to a shipyard. almost all modern shipyards practice modular shipbuilding approaches. They split the overall design into modeles which are constructed and outfitted. These are combined to form blocks, which are then further outfitted. The blocks are then moved to the construction berth, combined and integrated. Work is usually organised around 1 to 2 week production units (although sometimes 4 week ones are used). Testing is continuous and progressive as systems and compartments are completed. Test conditions are part of design. (Does this sound Familiar?). 

Although this practice evolved in the late 60s in Japan and gradually spread, it was in fact learnt from high rise building construction, with each floor of office or hotel blocks treated as a sprint.

Likewise, filming has a similar approach. Up front sketches are used to design each scene. Some work is done with cameras, lighting and film to workout the best combinations to achieve the cinematic affects required (a little similar to preliminary UI design). Scenes become the sprints and are filmed iterativelly to produce what can be afforded and so on. UAT is done with test audiences.

So Agile is not new, it's just slightly tailored to software development, and just like some of the other approaches used elsewhere, it's based on producing a right quality product with the minimum of fuss.