We know Agile rocks, but can Rock be Agile?

If I learned nothing else this Winter, it was that the process of making music in a rock band is pretty damned spontaneous and collaborative - with changing requirements the whole time as singers come and go from rehearsals, too many guitarists of differing abilities attempt to play on the same songs, musical keys need transposing for different vocalists and instruments, and downloaded tabs proving to be largely misleading and mostly wrong.

Some of the funnier moments were when the riffing of our talented lead guitarists and bass player started to go awry (it happened occasionally), and cries of "Jazz!" would go up, seemingly a code word for 'over-wrought bullshit riffing going nowhere here". Or maybe it's just that Tad has a big black Fender Jazz bass?

To the newbie, some rehearsals seemed to confirm every stereotype of rock music (think Spinal Tap), and as the resident 'Nigel' I would occasionally start looking for tiny stonehenges descending from the ceiling of the warehouse. But there is a mojo about a rock band that is so tangible you could use it to keep the 7:30pm Pizza delivery warm while a troublesome vocal is ironed out.


With this in mind, with great trepidation I suggested a little experiment as we kicked off the Christmas/ Summer band this week. An Agile story board - with suggested songs on cards, prioritised at a standup before each rehearsal, building up the set-list and eliminating the cries of "what's next?" and "where's the vocalist for this one gone?"

Would this kill the band's mojo? Plenty of software developers claim Agile does, but they don't work for Lonely Planet ;-) They're using their 'mojo' to build crap code somewhere else.

I spend much of my day job devoted to implementing Agile Software Development at Lonely Planet, where the fundamental principles of managing the delivery of software in a socio-technical fashion have a lot of parallels to the way I observed our band working - particularly getting started and getting organised each Thursday night, but also ensuring close teamwork from a multi-disciplinary musical group, and regularly reviewing what works and what doesn't.

Needless to say there was hue and cry from the artists about "it's not ROCK!" and "you can't organise rock music!"

It's always a little hard to tell among a dozen good-natured Australians in the presence of 2 dozen Carlton Bitter precisely when you are having the piss taken out of you (sometimes easier just to assume 'all the time'). Anyway, I was saved from humiliation by the real musicians grabbing the tools (board, cards, microphone, pens - see the photo) and in a matter of minutes we had the priority song-list for the night.

Someone quickly suggested we add the vocalist's name to the card. No cards would get played if they didn't have the requisite MP3 track to listen to, the lyrics on paper, and Tabs. Some cards got prioritised downwards for when our ace drummer is able to join the team later in the year. A card even got put in the 'not to be developed' column (Dave, we miss you already).

I'm fairly certain when my personal mini-stonehenge arrives it will have 'Scrum-master Flash' or a similar witticism etched on it to remind me of the evening - but anyway, we used to try to organise the set-list on an Excel bloody spreadsheet. Even I can see that certainly is not Rock.