Why agile can’t be ignored by Enterprises?
For those who don’t practice agile or are from non-IT background, let me first explain what Agile means.
Agility, by definition, is the ability to move quickly and efficiently. Agile is an umbrella word encompassing 15+ software development methodologies. It is incremental and iterative approach to software development. It has time boxed delivery duration of 2–4 weeks, driven by business value and has small cross functional teams.
Why your enterprise needs to adopt agile?
With increasing competition where new features /services/ offerings are added to competitor products on almost weekly basis, it is very important for organizations to stay relevant and this can be achieved through accelerated software development and shorter releases. Faster deliveries in shorter period can be achieved by adopting Agile methodologies. With agile implementation, the feedback cycles are short which helps in ensuring lower cost of change and more agility to adopt ever changing business priorities. With Agile and Devops, business can deliver the right product at the right time with right features and as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is also known as MVP — minimum viable product. This helps companies to fail fast and learn fast.
Organisations can use dual track agile where one team focuses on strategic initiatives (customer feedback, discover new features, story mapping, A/B testing) and other team is responsible for building shippable product and managing operations.
Challenges faced in adopting agile across the enterprise.
It’s looks very promising on paper, but many enterprises face challenges like culture, regulatory hurdles, process complexity, organization structure, unavailability of product owners time for team, skill gaps and platforms & tools while implementing agile principles and best practices. They need help from a good agile coach to change the mindset at enterprise level.
Scaling agile implementation
Earlier it was believed that agile methodology can be implemented for smaller teams only and but now there are frameworks to implement agile in larger organisations having distributed teams across locations working on different aspects of large product. Few most commonly used are SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), Less (Large Scale Scrum) and Scrum of scrums.
How companies are reaping benefits of agile adoption?
Few benefits reaped by enterprises by adopting agile and devops has resulted in 21% reduction in time spent on defect fixing, 19% improved code quality, 18% faster time to market and 18% increase in customers. (Ref: CA and Vanson Bourne Global Application Economy Study ,2014).
