After attending Adam’s session at the PowerPlatform Conference 2023, I started thinking about a couple of quotes he used during the session.

And more importantly, around creativity, innovation and productivity.

Innovation and Creativity

We need to be careful about the definition and use of the words Innovation and Creativity.

Innovation != Creativity

But, in both cases, we won’t be able to innovate or create amazing stuff if we don’t test, break, prototype …etc.

As a developer, you will need some time in your busy day, to not only learn and keep up to date with the technology but also, try new stuff, implement ideas, and break things (hopefully in Dev 😉 ) which will lead to amazing innovations.

The problem with Agile

Agile, as a methodology is great, and it allows the implementation of amazing complex projects nicely and steadily.
However, when it comes to the cons of the Agile methodology, I think that the way it is implemented is the root cause of all the criticism Agile is getting.

I am not particularly a big fan of two things

Low code

When Microsoft introduced PowerPlatform, the term ‘Low Code’ was and still is being widely used, which might lead to some misinterpretations.

The fact that it is open to non-technical users to build business applications, is an amazing jump in the technology adoption, but might also create some issues such as:

• Shadow IT,
• Loads of unfinished projects,
• Lack of visibility

We might argue, that with proper governance, all these risks can be mitigated and limited.

Pseudo-Agile

This is the root cause of the bad Agile implementations, where some companies focus on delivery time and short sprints, with loads of PBIs (product backlog items).

This will put a lot of pressure on the developers and reduce the innovation and creativity time.

I think in this particular scenario, the project developers will be more like coders, where they just focus on doing things quickly, without any room to innovate. More specifically, if there are dependencies between PBIs and to avoid impacting the project timeline, might lead to low-quality implementations.

How are AI and ChatGPT making this worse?

Now, if you give your developers a set of PBIs to implement, it is slowly making their role redundant. Especially when you consider the amazing stuff and code you can easily generate from ChatGPT.

What we need in this era, is room to innovate, let the developers test stuff, build, break and come up with amazing solutions. And this can only be done if there is room to innovate in the sprint, or between sprints.