Is Agile worth looking into?

Agile recognizes that people and teams are the foundation of successful product delivery. By empowering employees and fostering effective communication, businesses can accelerate collaboration and innovation. Agile values and principles profoundly affect communication, collaboration, and responsiveness. In agile organisations purpose and the mission are shared and owned by all employees. An important prerequisite for success is to have a network of empowered teams, which collaborate effectively, takes ownership and drives outcome.

Even in early development stages, agile emphasizes delivering a working product. This approach improves quality, provides valuable proof of progress and ensures alignment with customer needs. Product requirements are often not finalized at the start of the development process. An agile project is broken up into smaller versions of business value deliverables. Hereafter the deliverables are prioritised and sequenced. Before initiating the next deliverable in-line, it is crucial to demonstrate and collect feedback, and finally adjust plan and succeeding deliverables accordingly. When things are completed stepwise, it helps to reduce the overall complexity and at the same time improve quality of succeeding deliverables.

Too much work in progress can impact and slow the performance of the team because of frequent context switching, more complex quality assurance, and increased overhead of managing open project tasks. From a business perspective, it enables a potential early release of the entire business product. This can help recover development costs earlier and help fund later versions of the product.

Understanding customer perspectives and needs are key to success. This requires an “outside – in” thinking culture. Engaging customers throughout the process creates a sense of ownership and strengthens product longevity. One of the significant changes is that the goal is to frequently produce early versions of a completed products, that satisfies part of the customer requirements. This allows teams to review progress with customers in smaller, more focused increments, enabling them to gain valuable feedback and critical insight on improving, expanding, or even dropping requirements altogether.

Agile equips businesses to adapt to complex and uncertain environments. It allows teams to adjust quickly when requirements evolve, or unexpected needs arise. Risk and opportunity awareness and will and readiness to change plan and/or deliverables is an important part of agile. This requires an organisational flexibility and readiness to handle the actual deviations.

The stepwise implementation of products, regular reviews and incremental enhancements ensure that the final product meets customer expectations. The organisation encourages experimentation and learning from failures – and adapting based on new information. For this to work it is ultimately important to have a fast learning and decision structure. Technology is heavily being used to streamline processes, enhance communication and to enable remote work.