Why Do We Need to Be Agile?
Long ago, we roamed the land to gather food and shelter to survive. They were simple needs, but pretty agile. Sometime later, countries and economies grew and prospered on the back of the Industrial Revolution. This was the birth of management and control and the loss of agility. Now we’re in the Information Age or Revolution, where businesses employ knowledge workers. Knowledge workers are you, your partners, and your colleagues and peers, who endeavour to create great solutions to customer, business, social, economic, and world problems. Knowledge workers apply analysis, knowledge, reasoning, understanding, expertise, and skills to often loosely-defined and changing needs. These businesses and workers need methods and techniques that cannot be met by old Industrial Age processes and procedures. Agile supports interactions.
Virtually no software project can confidently set out at the beginning and know all that it needs in order to deliver valuable working software without change. Change presents both opportunities and risks to the success of a project. Unmanaged opportunities can mean the difference between a great company and an awesome company. Unmanaged risk spells disaster and ruin. Agile manages change.
Adopting Agile allows you to be responsive to changing or new requirements. It empowers development teams to be the experts and make decisions supported by an engaged, trusting, and informed business. It enables you to deliver to customers what they really want. Ultimately, it puts you and your organization in control of delivering high-quality, valuable software that delivers on customer need and expectations while extracting a return on your investment dollars as early as possible. Agile creates value.
There is a cost to adopting Agile. It doesn’t come for free. Transforming into an Agile approach for software delivery can be a hard path to follow. However, if you internalize the Agile philosophy, tread carefully, engage the right team with the right attitude, break things down, make it achievable and realistic, and respond to feedback, you will reap rewards. Agile emphasizes collaboration.
The following lists some benefits you can expect:
Speed to market
Earlier revenue generation
Regular delivery of real value
Protection for your investment
Data, data, data
Better product quality
Manageable expectations
Greater customer satisfaction
Higher performing teams
Improved visibility on progress
Predictability, transparency, and confidence
Manageable risk
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.