Are you Agile? If yes, are you using the term and some ceremony without truly embracing the philosophy? It’s important to refresh your understanding of what it means to be Agile and keep striving towards ever more Agility. And if you’re not Agile, start now!
“There is room for everyone in Agile as long as you’re willing to invest in yourself and learn new ways of working.” – Scott Ambler, Creator of Disciplined Agile Delivery
It Started With A Manifesto
The Agile Manifesto is a unique document that laid out the principles and philosophy of the Agile approach. It came from a group of software professionals who understood how technology was evolving and cared deeply about the end customers. Here are the 4 core values of Agile:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
While the aspects on the right are important and sometimes necessary, the aspects on the left should win in a fight.
What’s In It For You?
Agile principles are not just for software projects. The idea that you deliver quickly, consistently and align with the customer frequently is applicable to any kind of delivery. It will give you all-around results by:
- Not going too far down a path that you then have to reverse course from thus saving money
- Letting customers react to what they see, and learning about the end result together thus reducing time to market
- Not having to spend time perfecting something before you know it will be used a certain way
- Identifying deal breaker issues early
- Allowing individuals within your team to express themselves
- Continuously evolving your combined team’s working relationship into one built on trust, continuous delivery and improvement
- And much more…
It’s not just what we believe and what our customers love – Agile is already the norm for development teams and projects across the world. However, only 16% of teams are truly Agile where they apply and exhibit Agile behavior across all levels of the organization. Are you leading a team but want to truly uncover the benefits of Agile for your organization? We can help.
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