I heard an interesting question recently. It was clearly asked in good faith. Paraphrased, the question was:

I have been asked to do information gathering for my company’s digital operations to identify areas for improvement in agile ways of working. How can I best do this research?

Do you see the problem with this question? Think about it a moment…

That’s right. It’s a solution looking for a problem. Not a problem looking for a solution.

Not every problem can, or should be solved with an agile way of working.

Instead of looking for ways to implement agile (or DevOps, or Scrum, or TDD, or serverless, or whatever magic tool you may have discovered), look for genuine problems, then look for the best solution to those problems.

And if that solution involves your magic tool, that’s fine. But often it won’t.

Don’t be the proverbial hammer who sees every problem as a nail.