Being An Agile Company
Being agile is not just for the IT department
Agile development has completely changed how software is created. It makes the process more flexible, easier to manage and results in faster working products. The approach has been so successful that it is now changing how people work across the whole businesses.
The agile model relies on making small, iterative changes to projects which allows organizations to respond faster to changing business needs and demands from users and customers.
Although testing is still important, agile development also makes it easy to roll back applications if a problem arises. Agile teams may also choose to offer beta updates to sections of users rather than complete departments as part of the testing process.
Adapting to the Business World
The business world is changing so fast that companies need to be able to change processes and products far more quickly. That means that agile development needs support from the whole business. It needs finance to sign off on budgets, HR to approve hiring decisions, and operational IT to provide development platforms. Delays at any of these stages will slow the speed at which a company can create, test and deploy new products and services. In other words, it stops the organization working in an agile manner.
So companies are now expanding agile thinking beyond just software development.
Truly agile companies need to think more flexibly in every department. To stay competitive, companies need to update products and services on a continual basis, not just once or twice a year.
Naturally, every business needs controls but to accelerate development, changes need to happen in the culture of the whole organization.
Working Effectively Together
To work effectively this means people from different business areas have to be involved from the very start of a project. Staff need to be comfortable thinking flexibly about developing new products and services and their role in the business.
The development process won’t be speeded up by trying to get everyone to do everything at once, you will also need agile project management tools to help run the process. A truly agile organization will have tight control on workflows so people can concentrate on what needs to be done at that precise point in the process. Providing this clear focus is crucial to reducing development times.
Flexibility is also vital and this can be achieved by changing the culture of the company as much as by defining new business processes.
Becoming a truly agile company
The other fundamental benefit of agile development is that it is a continual process which absorbs feedback as it iterates through new releases. That means the process itself is flexible and reacts to staff feedback in exactly the same way as software developers should react to user responses.
A genuinely agile company puts its people before its processes. Agile working may not remove every obstacle to business transformation but it can help teams across the whole organization focus on continual improvement.
It can create the processes that your business needs to keep up with the ever increasing pace of digital transformation.
Read more information on business process change in our Solutions and Services section.
