What is Agile?

A common question among new start-ups and existing business who might be finding new answers with every consulting company they contact. At its core most businesses agree Agile is a project management ideology focused on iterative development on a per feature basis as opposed to one scope for an entire project. A proper Agile design allows for adaptability, higher complexity, and routine customer engagement. If such a design peaks your interest then read on as we walk through some examples and touch on the specific tools we use to help our customers excel.

By The Numbers

The 2021 State of Agile Report, the longest continuous annual series surveying IT and business professionals and corporations, found that Agile adoption among non IT teams had doubled and adoption of software development teams grew from 37% to 86% in the last year.

64%

Said Enhanced Ability to Manage Changing Priorities and
Accelerated Delivery were their reason for adopting Agile.

70%

Reported a positive impact to Managing Changing Priorities and
Visibility.

64%

Reported a positive impact on Delivery Speed/Time to market
after adopting Agile.

The Case Of The Ever Expanding Scope Creep

The Issue

Its far too common a story and certainly something all of us can be guilty of doing. A request is put in and development begins on a new project, but as the realities of the endeavor clash with the theoretical, we find new needs arising that we couldn't predict.

The Traditional Bottleneck
So how do we address these new concerns in the traditional, waterfall method. We'll typically we invest a lot of time and review during the initial planning and scoping phase to ensure we get the odds of scope creep as close to zero as possible. After all, delays and overburn from scope creep can be the difference between profitability and death for companies new and old. When new requirements do rear their head in the middle of the build phase for traditional project management, companies usually do all they can to address their customers needs but are unfortunately met with bureaucratic nightmares in red tape and approvals placing projects on hold.

The Agile Solution

In an Agile managed project, scoping becomes a much more adaptable process. Due to Agile's focus on breaking projects down into features new requirements in almost all cases are no different then any other feature that would have been identified at the scoping phase. As requirements arise for new features they get sent to the Product Backlog. As teams complete their latest Sprint, a standardized time frame for individual feature development, they pluck new features from the Product Backlog to create their next Sprint. In this manner, the requirements trickle into the constantly proceeding workflow at whatever speed is needed for that individual feature's approvals resulting in no stalling or delaying to the development and completion of other features.

What can be interestingly unique is the many effects this initial breakdown of work can have on the rest of project management. Complex projects with many interconnected dependencies are already broken into their own features. From a management perspective this allows tracking of the prerequisite endeavors throughout the project. With a professional build, reports can be generated on a routine basis alerting managers of upcoming bottlenecks prior to their emergence, allowing time for support or remediation without impact to other teams. Published features can be selectively shared with your customers increasing engagement and confidence in your services. Routine interaction with customers through proactive development can lead to requirement updates prior to the crunch hours of the testing phase keeping projects within their timeframes. Even engagement with in house teams increases as rather then waiting for entire projects to be ready for the next phase of development the individual features can be passed along allowing work to commence immediately in ways that steadily feed rather then overwhelm a team.

“If the traditional method of project management is the Ford model then the Agile method is a living breathing organism.”

Toby Sevir, Product Manager