About

The Keeping Agile Mission

Keeping Agile is all about thinking and intelligently adapting to your environment; whether you are a person, a family, a group of friends, a team, a small business, a large corporation or even a country. It simply doesn’t matter.  Change is the essential process of all living things.  It is very difficult however, to deal with rapid change.  The amount of change in recent history in economics, our physical environment, our social world and most of all technology goes beyond evolution.  It represents a transformational revolution.  This will continue to accelerate in the future, rendering much of our traditional beliefs outdated and even dangerous.

Keeping Agile’s mission is to be a rallying point for thought and action.  It is not just about software development.  That is such a very small part of being agile. In fact, you cannot really be very agile in your software development unless your entire enterprise is agile.  That is not to say that there is no advantage in isolated agile implementations or adopting just a few agile concepts.  History shows that there is.  But the full benefits of agile are only realized when everyone is on board.

Keeping Agile is not about dogma nor is it pursuant of a specific nomenclature like scrum and it certainly is agnostic about a fixed methodology.  While I will take some pains to describe things like Lean and Kanban, I do so only for clarity’s sake.  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet[1]!  The only axe that I have to grind here (so to speak) is to get people to look around them, break out of the shell of rigid thinking and adapt and be creative in order to be successful.

Along the way, I hope everyone remembers that life is short and ethics are not a commodity of convenience.  In many ways our ethics, our vision and our moral compass are all the stability we have left in this rapidly changing universe.  I say universe instead of world because our understanding of physics has grown so far beyond the Euclidean view of the world that shortly, perhaps even in my life time, we will be presented with a profoundly different view of our very existence and time itself.  This will challenge our belief structures and be too much for some people to cope with.

We can though each in our own way, begin today to adapt to change.  In doing so, we become a part of it and guide the change and help bring others along.  This means everybody wins.  It doesn’t need to be a conflict of winners and losers.  Some will refuse to change, holding onto their bastions of fading power and repressing as many as they can control.  This is a fleeting reality, for change like time waits for no one.

I write articles here that cover the gamut of my agile thinking from business organization to project management to software development techniques to everyday life issues.  If you practice agile thinking in your everyday life you’ll be happier, worry less and business agility will become more natural to use.  So remember every day to keep agile!

Brian Lucas – February 27, 2013

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About Brian Lucas

In his life, Brian Lucas has been a coach, farm worker, forester, health care advocate, life guard, general contractor, mechanic, mixologist, musician/singer (in a rock group), salesman and teacher.  Brian has worked in the Information Technology area as a project manager, technical marketer, methodologist, manager, software architect, systems designer, data modeler, business analyst, systems programmer, software developer and creative writer.  These efforts include over a hundred hi-tech initiatives in almost every business and industrial sector as well as government and military projects.  Among them, he designed and developed a quality assurance system for the first transatlantic fiber optic communications network, a manufacturing system for a large computer manufacture’s seven manufacturing centers, a data mining system for steel production, an instrumentation system for cable systems, defined requirements for government’s information systems and designed and developed human performance management systems.  Brian has educated and mentored many.  He has also lectured extensively to a variety of audiences.  Brian is currently devoting as much time as possible to the innovation of business and organizational agility along with the next generation of agile software development.  As an amateur theoretical physicist he is working on joining general relativity and quantum mechanics through a multidimensional time corollary on string theory and negating the uncertainty principle in favor of Louis de Broglie’s wave/particle hypothesis.  He is also an avid blue-water sailor and wilderness backpacker.  He enjoys billiards, boxing, chess, cooking, famous battle reenactments and war gaming, fencing, flying, gardening, horseback riding, martial arts (particularly Ninjutsu), philosophy and psychology, playing musical instruments (7 so far), poker, rapid-fire target shooting, reading (he tries to read a new book every night), painting with oils, scuba diving and skiing.