Overview
Hello All, This is my first blog in management and
specifically agile topic. I have been blogging on SharePoint on my personal
blog and recently inactive due to more management related work. After doing
some work on project management and working as Scrum Master Role I experienced
some magic things which I thought I could share with you. May be this effort
help you in your successful journey..!
I have seen some of the important agile benefits in my agile
journey and project management tenure which are helping companies to grow
vertically and I tried my best way to explain it in below sections.
All the content and images is borne from my mind it has no
relation with any other copy right content. I have used some reference only for
getting the idea and understanding he importance of the topic. Wherever I has used reference content and
images I have proactively noted that content as courtesy from them.
So now let’s get moved to our main topic. Below are the main
six agile benefits I explained in detailed, which I think helping more compared
to others in the organization rapid growth.
Let’s understand first how agile is getting adopted industry
wide. Below section contains some information from VersionOne survey done for
finding the agile adaptation and its impact in industry growth.
Being Agile
Agile has become must have project management methodology
for all kind of Industries and its helping them with many more benefits. Agile
is now global as lot of companies has adopted it. The VersionOne survey says that all types of industries are now using
the agile methodology. Companies who have totally adopted agile have seen
measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, employee work satisfaction, and
quality work. Below is the survey information which gives the idea how agile is
getting adopted in various industry.
Courtesy: versionone, 10th agile survey report April, 2016
·
95%
of the organizations represented use agile approaches in their software
development
·
Despite
the level of take up by organizations, 53% of respondents indicated that less
than half of their teams use agile methods
·
The
top three benefits that organizations get from adopting agile approaches are
o 87% ability to manage changing priorities
o 85% increased team productivity
o 84% improved project visibility
Benefits
Using agile for project management gives many benefits. When
many and more word comes then it’s always hypothetical and moves our
concentration from important points. I always like the fishbone chart to
analyze this kind of information and highlights the 20% of key points which are
causing the 80% of the result. Its more suits to cause and effects. In this
blog I tried to highlight those top six benefits which are important and I
think organizations must concentrate those in agile methodology which can give
them measurable growth.
There are many more benefits and each of them helping the
organization in their growth. Executing the projects using agile methodology
helps the organizations in building the long term relationship with customer in
very short time. Agility gives crystal clear transparency about the team, day
to day work and shippable result which is get created after every sprint. Every
small and medium size venture always looks for early ROI and agile gives them this
opportunity. The daily scrum gives the clarity of the work and progress so
there are no surprises to client after delivery of the work.
1. Allows Change: Old methodologies (waterfall
and iterative) have work and scope already planned and then it moves to execution.
Allowing any change in scheduled plan is very complex in these methodologies
and none of the stakeholder is happy about it. This was affecting more to the
project sponsors and due to this it’s creating more obstacles in client
engagement.
Agile made it very easy, other
methodologies were considering change as threat but agile made changes more
manageable. It embraces the requirement change. Here it’s important to
understand how agile accepts the change. Changing the requirement also does not
mean changing the task in between the sprint development. The current
requirement get completed in on going and its locked for any kind of
enhancement, changes is planned sprint items. When sprint get completed the
completed work is delivered and then new story will be added in next sprint to
adopt the changes. This process maintains the quality deliverable along with
concluding the work in committed timeline.
1.
Transparency:
This is one more benefit which is helping the
organizations in trust building among all the stakeholders of the project.
Client is the sponsor an main stakeholder of the project who is more sensitive about every happenings of the
project. Client always wish to have crystal clear picture of the project in
case of team members, their work and the result. Agile provides the SCRUM
board, CANBAN boards where all the story and its task listed with sticky notes
and this is clear picture o of ongoing work. The board give clarity of the work
owner, progress and the likely result after the sprint completion.
Another stakeholder is the team, it’s
always demand from the development team for the clarity of the requirement with
respect to the scope and time line. Agile give them liberty to decide on both.
In sprint planning team get the clarity of the requirement and in poker
estimation technique, team decide the efforts. So with this approach team is
very clear for their goal in the sprint.
2.
Shippable
Deliveries: As said above every small and mid-size organizations looks for
early ROI (return on investment) and there are various reasons for it.
Important thing here is that client get shippable product on every sprint
completion and it allows client to start earing while investing. Client can put
the delivered product in production and start getting revenue from it. In
earlier methodologies client get shippable product at the end of the project
completion. Agile gave them the platform to earn while investing.
3. Client Engagement
Agile practice gives very good platform to
engage the client and create long term trustworthy relations with them. Client
gets very good clarity while working with agile team and that’s the main
concerns to them. Product owner is client’s person who is tightly connected
with development team and scrum master to know the sprint work. The product
owner can attend daily stand up by remaining silent to get insights of project
work. After every sprint there is retro and review where product owner gets the
more details about work and its velocity. Like this way Agile gives the more
flexibility in involving client stakeholder during the project execution. The
client gets engaged with organisation
with tight bonding as he get chance to
talk to root and branch resource of the company.
4. Employee Satisfaction and Productivity
Increase
Employee satisfaction is the key factor in
any organisations growth. Employee must be satisfied about his work. Previous
methodologies were very stringent and either do not give any chance to a
developer to express their thoughts on requirement or any input on efforts. In
agile requirements are explained by product owner and it has proper description
and clear scope and acceptable criteria along with stories. Sprint planning
meeting gives the platform to the individual member to discuss and understand
the story. Once every one from development team is clear about the work then
along with scrum master and product owner team gives the estimate using poker
planning technique. Over all it’s the individual team member inputs for efforts
and their commitment to the deliverable. It has been found and observed every
team member work closely with every other team member. Every right result boost
the employee’s confidence and their satisfaction towards work. Every team
member perform by their best and deliver the result on time. The
Tuckman’s team formation stages are
also equally important for team building.
5. High Quality
Quality is the obvious factor in project
development. Agile gives quality result to the customer. There are some factors
due to which quality hampers, and they are:
1.
Lack of clarity in requirement
2.
Poor understanding of the requirement
3.
Continuous change in requirement
4.
Change in scope of the work
5.
Stringent
or less efforts compared to actual work
6.
Team spirit
Everyone would
confused little here as I said that “Allows Change” as one of the key benefit
of the agile and here I am saying it as constraint. It’s important to
understand how agile allows the change in the requirement and I have explained
it in “allows Change “point.
All the above listed points are proactively get addressed
using agile scrum frame work with its component like Sprint planning, daily stand-up,
sprint review and sprint retrospective and due to that its always high quality
result in agile projects.
Hope my thoughts helps organisations helps in understanding
the key 20% benefits in boosting their 80% growth using agile.
