Why Agile ?
Basic
difficulty
Stage 1
Agile IQ® Level
Mindset
Practices
Manifesto
Framework
Introduction
Many organisations seek agility. Its promise is faster delivery, higher quality, and lower costs, all with sustainable pace.
71% of organisations adopt agile to reduce project costs - CollabNet VersionOne (2019)
Project management continues to fail us
Over the last few decades, Standish has surveyed thousands of companies across indstries and reported that traditional project management approaches are not successful in delivering value, particularly in complex environments.
Agile frameworks are designed to be adaptive. Their iterative and incremental approach to delivery ensures:
- Higher transparency.
- Lower risk.
- Improved delivery capability.
What's in it for me? And the team?
Self Management
Agile teams are self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.
When teams self-manage, they are more effective:
- More effective
- Faster decision-making
- Increased productivity 15-20%
- Higher quality
- Achieve goals more often
- Feel more useful
- Feel more challenged
Agile teams are responsible for all product-related activities from stakeholder collaboration, verification, maintenance, operation, experimentation, research and development, and anything else that might be required. They are structured and empowered by the organisation to manage their own work
What does the manager do?
A manager’s role shifts from task management and being directive on what to do and how to do it to:
- Establishing the guardrails that guide self management
- Managing the environment that the team works in.
What’s the catch?
Self-management comes at a cost. Agile teams are expected to:
- Work within the guardrails that managers establish for decision-making. The more mature an agile team, the more it makes its work transparent, the greater the autonomy managers will give to the team.
- Deliver an Increment of work each Sprint, one that is of high enough quality to give to stakeholders and users to use.
- Work within timeboxes for agile events like planning, review and retrospectives.
- Hold each other to account as professionals.
Download
Download the Agile vs Traditional ways of working poster (A4).
References
CollabNet VersionOne (2019) 13th Annual State of Agile Report.
Standish (2020) CHAOS Report.
Sutherland, J. and Schwaber, K. (2020) The Scrum Guide. The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game.
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