Agile Introduction

What is Agile

The series you are reading currently is the Agile Introduction Series as part of the large set of Agile material.

If you’ve seen waterfall you’ve seen big up front design (BUFD), phases and long…long waits before seeing if the solution developed meets the needs and realises value.

In fact waterfall realises value only toward the end of the process, when customers start using it. That is if the requirements were correct at time of drafting and the business hasn’t needed a system to accommodate new requirements. The market could have shifted, the product feature set is no longer current.. the value is less than planned.

Agile then, is a set of management practices and conventions to support and manage the flow of value to a client earlier, more regularly and to ensure alignment with the goals and requirements of the client. Agile realises value earlier, sooner and allows changes to be accommodated more easily than the waterfall phases and milestones/stage gates approaches.

Agile used to be for software and solutions development alone, but is now used for all sorts of value streams where physical or virtual goods are made, and I’ve been seen business units manage their work through an agile process which supports their team at the level they’re at.

What is agile then?

Agile is built on

a foundation of agile values and agile principles,
an iterative approach to delivery,
self-organizing and self-managing teams,
teams which comprise all the skills necessary to realise the outcome required,
collaboration with and between the team and the client,
frequent review of the process and the product and adapting where required to ensure that the things don’t go ‘off the rails’,
regular reflection on the state of the processes involved, the team communicates issues and areas for improvement which are then provides a continuous improvement framework,
regular delivery of value (product or other) to the client, through iterations delivering a working product / artefact / thing at the end of every iteration cycle.

Agile has a foundation in lean practices as well, and these will be explored on the methodolagile™ articles, series, blog and content. Sign up to the mailing list to keep up to date.

Flavours of Agile

Agile has many flavours and frameworks. All of them should remain true to the values and principles of the agile manifesto.

There is Scrum. There is Kanban. There are various frameworks, all of which can guide how you make agile work to suit the team, the work and the delivery model required. There are scaling frameworks for teams of teams. I aim to provide enough content to decide where to invest your effort, which methodology and conventions to bring to your team, and any practices that may help make those teams successful.

Summary

Waterfall does not deliver the value early and requirements or customer needs are mostly incorrectly assumed in the beginning, or they change as time passes. So your team needs a better way. Consider the values and principles as well as practices of agile that can make an agile team successful.