You’ve probably heard tech companies using numerous buzzwords to indicate how they work, and what environment they cultivate in the day-to-day running of their business. It sounds impressive, but is there any real meaning behind it? In short, yes and no. I know, helpful. But here’s one buzzword that you should be looking out for when choosing a tech partner: agile.

What is agile?

In common terms, agile is the ability to move quickly and with ease. This is often misinterpreted in tech, which refers to agile from the Agile Manifesto.

In technical terms, and what we’re talking about here, being agile is about customer collaboration, individuals and interactions and quickly responding to change.

Let’s break it down. Here’s how to begin to work ‘agile’:

People — whether this is your development team, your stakeholders or your end user, it’s important to give value to people and interactions over the process of the project. Give your team the environment and support they need and then let them get on with it! Trusting your team to get the job done is vital to empowering and motivating them.

Continuous improvement — by working iteratively (breaking your features into bitesize chunks of work to complete within a short timeframe that is both achievable and moving toward the larger goal), you know you’re actively working towards features almost weekly. Your product is growing at pace, and your customers aren’t left waiting for months or years for updates.

Pivot! — working in 1-2 week iterations allows your teams to collect feedback on your new feature extremely quickly. If you’ve spent 1 week building out a feature and the market has changed, you haven’t wasted months creating an entire product to find that it’s effectively useless. It allows you to pivot and change direction almost immediately over following a set stagnant plan.

Market has changed suddenly? Features you’re building aren’t delivering the value you anticipated? PIVOT, what a luxury!

Collaboration — all relevant stakeholders, customers, team members are part of the progress of each iteration and have full visibility of the project from start to end. Working as a team toward a common goal is essential to the projects success and transparency is fundamental here; the word is banded around in business a lot and often not delivered on.

Why is this important?

For your company, this is important because it will save you time and money (and some employee frustration) in being able to recognise failings quickly and get you back on track delivering value.

For software developers (us), it’s important because it means we can show you where we are at in your build on a weekly basis, we only deliver value to your business and customers, and we can actively track how long we’ll need to deliver your project.

How can it improve your business?

Using agile methodologies and frameworks help to streamline your processes and your mindset. Over time, this will encourage your teams to start thinking like entrepreneurs, so rather than just focusing on the single task in front of them, they will begin to see the ripple effect that a decision they make will have on their end users.

We understand that making any change to your business takes time, and sometimes a lot of convincing! We use agile practices on a daily basis and are experts in helping companies implement them for the long term. Not only do we teach teams how and why we use them, but we show how it can have a huge affect on your day-to-day and become elite performing tech teams.

Agile can be applied to any branch of business, not only tech. It may be that your iteration lead times could be longer (no longer than 4 weeks!), but the principles are still the same.

So to sum up:

Break your work into small, workable chunks

Deliver continuously

Collect feedback regularly and be ready to pivot

Be visible and share the journey as you go

Collaborate with all involved in the project

Create a supported working environment for your team

A couple of great book recommendations, if you want to find out more:

The Lean Start Up, Eric Ries

Scrum: The art of doing twice the work in half the time, Jeff Sutherland