In 2001, 17 leading software developers met in the United States and took ownership of the word 'agile' to describe a set of software development principles that would come to guide the industry to a more realistic and relevant delivery process.
Fourteen years on, the Agile Manifesto has garnered great respect for its approach to project management. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, with continuous improvement and rapid and flexible response to change.
These principles had the capability to powerfully transform the software development industry, but here's the big news: agile approaches are effective in all areas of business, not just IT. Software developers may have taken ownership of 'agile', but now, business needs it back.
It's with this in mind that two women who, yes, had worked in software development, launched a company in 2011 to help businesses implement agile methodologies.
"We help companies understand what agile can mean for their business. We help them to continually look at how things are working and improve on them," says Karen Greaves, who founded Growing Agile with Samantha Laing.
Agile methodologies recognise that the fast pace of change in information technology means massive projects that take two years to implement are outdated by the time they're delivered. Instead, the agile development cycle focuses on small chunks of development with two-weekly deliveries.
Each new piece of software functionality can be used and tested, and the project can be built on and delivered incrementally from there.
Agile will not succeed unless it's driven from the top.
Rob Knight, IMQS
"This significantly improved on the old 'waterfall' project management method, in which developers lied about what they could and would deliver, worked crazy hours with no hope of delivery and then left clients mostly unhappy with projects after spending huge amounts of money," Greaves says.
Agility in practice
But the fast pace of change isn't exclusive to software developers. All areas of business are faced with the challenge of needing to respond quickly to market forces and ensure they remain current in the face of industries that are in a state of constant disruption.
Companies that think they're innovative are often trapped in outdated ways of doing things, and this is what Growing Agile attempts to help them address.
"Sometimes people know what they need to do, but it takes an outsider to come in and see what's happening in order to identify where the change actually needs to be made," says Greaves.
This was the case with Rob Knight, the CEO of IMQS, a small software development company. He felt that as a growing software company, their waterfall development processes were slow and unstructured, which resulted from arranging the business around the products. "We wanted to move away from waterfall with its six-month delivery cycles," he says.
Leap of faith
They called in Growing Agile, who supported them in implementing agile methodologies, which Knight says has changed the way they do business for the better. "It was a revelation. It brought about flexibility and visibility of what was being built."
He says that with the shorter delivery cycles with clearly defined deliverables and implementation of self-managing teams, there's no need to watch over his developers' shoulders. He also learnt that agile has to have buy-in from every person in the company.
"Agile will not succeed unless it's driven from the top," he says. "We did the training on the process with everyone in the company, from me to the tea lady. If you don't have this buy-in throughout the business, then you're just doing the same old things with a new language."
IMQS continues to engage with Growing Agile to refresh their agile understanding and processes. The agile approach is a far more psychologically-sound way of dealing with teams. It's well known that people deal better with digestible chunks of work, transparency and support than with distant and almost insurmountable deadlines and cracking whips.
However, implementing agile does take a leap of faith on the part of management, and despite the good work being done by companies like Growing Agile, it remains to be seen whether this methodology will revolutionise the IT industry and the business workplace as we know it.
Before you get agile
According to Karen Greaves, before you take the plunge and implement agile technologies, you need to know the following:
* Agile is a completely different mindset; it's not just a new process.
* You need to be able to fail and learn from that. If failure is not an option, don't adopt agile.
* One of the most important elements is trust. If you can't trust your team, then agile is not for you.
* Be prepared to change everything: your organisational structure, your deadlines, your roles, your products and, most importantly, your mind.
This article was first published in Brainstorm magazine. Click here to read the complete article at the Brainstorm website.
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