Agile & Harry Potter

What has Agile got to do with Harry Potter unless of course we are talking about how agile he is when he flies The Firebolt, the broomstick? That’s probably a discussion for another day. Let us now talk about Agile, the ways of working involving delivering value to business through Features, Epics and Stories.

Our Agile ways of working started predominantly during the work-from-home era due to pandemic. Since then, my kids have been exposed to quite a lot of Agile terminology. Two days back I was referring to User Stories in a conversation and Ryan, my ten-year-old promptly asked, ‘Appa, what are these Stories you are talking about. Is this something which you keep writing and publishing?’.

Now, how do you make a ten-year-old kid understand Scrum practices and Agile concepts such as breaking down of boulders, stones and pebbles. While kids these days are smarter than most adults, I still wanted to give an easier explanation. That’s when I noticed my son holding Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth book in the series. A sudden spell came to my mind!

‘Here you go’, I said. ‘Imagine you have finished reading a chapter in this book. That is equivalent to a Story, the smallest piece of work that can be taken up and completed. Once you finish all the chapters in the book, that’s when you can say you are done with an Epic. When you finish all seven books in the Harry Potter series, you have completed a Feature. The catch is you do all these within a defined timeline which we call cadence.’

He seemed to be quite under my spell and I wasn’t finished yet!

I said, ‘Ryan, these Harry Potter books belong to your library which has quite a lot of other books as well. If you finish reading all of them, you have successfully delivered an Initiative, the topmost item in the Agile delivery chain which gets created based on the demand from your business unit’.

His face was beaming and I was quite convinced that I have simplified a complex model of Software Engineering as much as possible for my son. It was nothing short of magic! At least that’s what I thought till the time I heard another tiny voice from behind asking a question. It was Mia, Ryan’s younger sister.

‘But Appa’, she countered saying, ‘Amma had clearly told brother not to spend too much time with his story books. He needs to focus on his studies.’

I couldn’t help but smile, not just because of the seriousness of the argument, but being presented with an excellent opportunity to help them understand Agile better.

‘Yes darling, that is right, and it also is one of the most important principles of Agile which we call as prioritization. This is how you determine which piece of work is more important than the others. Just like studying well gives you good marks, reading other books gives you knowledge. This is the value that you deliver for yourself, just like how the User Stories deliver value to Appa’s business unit.’

I now have two budding Product Managers who are Agile ready, well almost!