People still ask quite often. What is Agile? How do I convince my boss that we need to do Agile? How do we persuade our clients that we need to go Agile? Cost wise and time wise?
It’s been quite a while since Agile has been released and embraced by the software management community. It’s name, “Agile”, is not a hard term to grasp. Yet being Agile is hard to achieve. By itself, it sounds vague. It’s sounds unclear and it scary.
So what does Agile mean? Well, it does not mean starting without plan. Far from that. It does mean, start with the end in mind. Know and be clear on the vision, the goals and objectives. The purpose. Share it with ALL the team members. Get their buy-in. Be transparent with each and everyone in your team and ensure alignment towards the same goal.
Start small. Build brick by brick and room by room. But whatever brick or set of bricks you are releasing ( up to you), make sure that those bricks are released safely and ready to use.
Step by step and sprint by sprint, add on to the bricks. Get checkpoints in place. With the internal team and with the sponsors and management. Show, explain, educate and listen. Most importantly listen. To the feedback from each and every team member. Empower your users, your developers, your sponsors and your managers to contribute. Listen. Prioritize features, feedback and adapt. Make sure the overall plan and vision are still on track. Build the next brick. Use the same amount of time for the next brick(sprint).
This is how you control scope creep and cost. This is how you, while you build, you educate and get feedback. That’s how you adapt and you are agile. This is how the house you’ll build, remains recent and when it’s done, it’s up to date.
Not as a last priority, allocate time for cleaning. Allocate time for decorating. But be practical first. Listen. Adapt. Build. Ship.
Yes, ship. Release early and as often as possible. Make the rooms of the house liveable, one by one.
Release, continuously. To get feedback. To test that you have built correctly and to optimize.
Are there risks? Yes! Measure them constantly and minimize them. Have redundancy in place from the very first moment. Have a great base. Test. Automate. Test. Ensure stability at any point in the release for the new bricks and previously released bricks.
Will you always build a house? No, you probably won’t. Sometimes you’ll just build on top of the room that’s already there. You’ll decorate. Or you’ll upgrade. Recognize it.
Build it as it is.
This is not the theory you’ll learn. This is not what they will directly test you on. But this is my practical take on what does it mean to be Agile on a daily basis.
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