Today's market requires more collaboration and movement among teams to compete successfully.
In recent years, digital transformations have shifted from long-term business goals to a matter of survival. Digital acceleration has also shown that the promise of agility, once reserved for software teams, is something everyone needs.
Agile is a set of ideas, frameworks, and tools that help manage work more efficiently. We will understand together how it differs from waterfall methodology, what values and principles help teams deal with daily work while staying organized and productive.
Agile ideas encourage being more flexible, to meet unpredictable changes, without sacrificing communication, increasing step-by-step work while learning continues.
This methodology teaches indispensable values, draws guidelines that urge the individual as well as the team, inviting flexibility and better workflows for many market verticals.
The use of the term agile (or agile software development, agile software development, abbreviated to ASD) was introduced by the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (Manifesto for Agile Software Development) published in 2001 by a group of software developers (Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Robert C. Martin, and others) looking for an alternative to the waterfall which they felt was too slow, rigid, and inefficient.
The group has devised a new approach to software project management, a short document that encapsulates new guidelines for software development and allows work to be done in circumscribed, sprint periods, using kanban and scrum to manage goals and deadlines.
Agile is not just following a process, it is a mindset that allows you to prioritize the most critical activities efficiently and flexibly, rewarding constant communication with stakeholders as you work.
Here are the four cornerstone values for successfully navigating deadlines and new goals:
The best guitar is useless if there are no people who can play it. Good instruments and processes help, but focusing on individuals and their interactions will produce better results.
Here's why successful teams prioritize finding the right people, making sure they communicate frequently to uncover critical information and move the work forward.
Before agile, teams moved around the perimeter of project requirements, with little flexibility, instead of looking for critical functionality to deliver as MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to customers as quickly as possible. This approach allows them to get a working product and get real-time feedback to improve future interactions.
Collaborating with customers throughout the process, gathering feedback frequently, and adapting to new needs to quickly solve their problems is an added value.
Consider your customers as partners working closely together to design the best solution.
Before agile, teams spent a lot of time detailing a product that rarely provided added value in the end.
While waterfall assumes sequential development -- one completes one phase before moving on to the next --, the agile model supports multiple sequences simultaneously, promotes development and testing as continuous, simultaneous processes.
Markets, teams, projects, and situations are constantly changing: successful teams must remain flexible and ready to adapt to unforeseen changes.
Starting with a plan is always a good idea, but one must not be overly rigid in sticking to it!
The agile methodology is not only customer centric, but gives relevance to the work of agile teams that are multifunctional, self-organized, contribute to transparency of information, frequent sharing of feedback, and are responsible for end-to-end process, measurement metrics, and control.
We would like to remind you of the twelve principles of Agile methodology:
There are dozens of agile frameworks, kanban and scrum are among them.
Kanban is a framework that helps teams visualize work and continuously improve. You can keep track of work by checking with team members the status of each work item at any time.
Here are some particularly appreciated advantages:
Let's take an example: a communications agency is launching a campaign to introduce a new product, Francesca is the graphic design. The team has several tasks: creating a social media strategy, searching for useful keywords for SEO, writing text and designing creative. These tasks are organized on a kanban board with a workflow that starts from thebacklog, then moves to selected for development, in progress, and completed depending on the stage of processing.
Francesca's job is to produce creative based on the social media strategy, when she starts the job, she will move the ticket from backlog to in progress, then start on a new task while waiting for approval from the social media manager. Once received, it will move the first task to completed and focus on another task.
Does your team use a kanban board?"
Scrum is a framework that focuses on roles, iterative and incremental deliverables. These can be customized and adapted. Work is completed in short, predetermined increments. Teams are encouraged to reflect and learn from experience, always focused on continuous improvement, share responsibility, so involvement and participation are an expression of shared leadership.
Is your team ready to work in scrum?
Choosing the right approach depends on the specific details of the project, the people involved, and the desired results. The waterfall and agile approaches have their pros and cons that should not be underestimated.
You have probably already used the waterfall approach in your work experience.
A linear approach to project management involves carefully defining requirements accurately. Each phase comes of the project in sequential order, at the end, an important product is completed and delivered.
Since a software development project can take years to complete and technology can change significantly, Agile is an ongoing approach to project management, allowing you to remain flexible and respond quickly to changing needs, prioritizing the elements that create the most value for your customers. Results are completed and shared continuously, in small increments.
Twenty years later, the ways of working suggested by the Agile Manifesto continue to guide some of the highest performing teams, not just those of software developers.
This has been encouraged by remote work, which has fueled a boom in agile adoption in various teams and organizations, from law firms to marketing agencies.
Agile project management can help any team be more agile, efficient, and flexible depending on team structure, end results, or changes along the way.
There are several factors to consider in choosing the right approach between Waterfall and Agile methodology.
Does your project require strict regulations or requirements? Waterfall is best suited for projects with regulations or requirements that do not require flexibility, the results of each phase and rigorous procedures ensure compliance.
The project stakeholders and resources of the respective teams how involved will they be?
Agile methodology is best suited if stakeholders are closely involved at every step of the way.