What is agile delivery?
Agile delivery is a particular stage in your agile process. Agile isn’t so much a methodology as a philosophy for successfully delivering a product to your customer while also continuously improving your services.
Therefore, agile delivery is really about making sure that your tasks are broken down into small, manageable chunks for your team so that they can provide the best quality product to your customers. The top concerns of your team for agile delivery include:
Successful collaboration
One of the most important aspects of agile teams is successful collaboration. The agile philosophy emphasises free, natural communication between all team members in a way that allows for easy collaboration. The idea is that this allows for more effective and faster collaboration opportunities between and within your teams without having to adhere to a rigid hierarchy of who can collaborate with which team members.
A focus on customer needs
Another important focus of agile delivery is ‘what does the customer want from your software?’ So, agile delivery involves creating products that satisfy and prioritise customer needs. It also involves meeting these needs quickly and intelligently. As your customer needs are subject to change over time, this means that even when you have delivered a project, constant testing is still required to ensure that your project continues to meet customer needs – and a changing product market.
Prioritising the most important tasks over others
If your team is using Scrum methodology (see below), one of the core components of this is prioritising which aspects of your product will have the most value to your customers first. This continues on from the agile philosophy of always focussing on what your customer needs are and having this at the core of everything that you do.
Breaking down large projects into smaller, more manageable chunks
Agile methodology also involves making projects easier for your software teams to review. By breaking them down into smaller projects, your team can more easily review and refine these and how they work as part of the bigger software development picture. It also means that your team can more easily refine different aspects of your product if customer or collaborator needs change over time or during troubleshooting processes.
This also allows them to make continuous changes to the product without having to create a new product or start from scratch.
How to adopt the agile mindset
In order for your team to create deliverables in accordance with the agile philosophy, it’s important to help them understand what the agile mindset is through learning and development. Developing a learning environment that enables them to understand the core principles of agile, therefore, is key. You might choose to provide this tuition via webinars or conferences where they can discuss the approach with other professionals. Some of the key aspects of the agile mindset are:
Seeing problems as learning opportunities
Instead of seeing problems or troubleshooting issues as a setback, the agile mindset involves considering these as an opportunity to learn more. This could be an issue with the product itself that leads to your developers gaining more advanced skills in their niche or simply learning more about what your customers are looking for from your product.
Changes in your market may also lead to some aspects of your product becoming redundant, but this can be a new opportunity to learn about why this is the case, as well as what functionalities could make your product more competitive again. Therefore, the agile mindset can help your team stay focused on keeping your product timely, useful and relevant to customers as needs and markets change over time.
Building an agile environment
As well as encouraging your employees to adopt an agile mindset, agile delivery also requires building the right kind of environment where their approach to work and processes can thrive. An agile environment involves allowing individuals to collaborate with each other within and across teams rather than relying on strict processes and hierarchies between team members. It therefore allows for more creative, adaptable problem solving on a case-by-case basis, with an overall focus on meeting customer satisfaction through streamlined products as opposed to creating products with extensive manuals or other documentation.
Creating an agile environment allows your teams to focus on providing products that meet market requirements as swiftly as possible.
Different types of frameworks for agile delivery
As agile itself is a philosophy as opposed to a methodology, there are many different ways to interpret and use it. We’ll now look at some of the ways that you can prescribe agile methodology in order to meet your project deliveries:
Scrum methodology
One of the most popular frameworks that adheres to the agile philosophy is the Scrum methodology. The Scrum methodology takes a focus on continuous learning based on trial and error, experience and self-organisation. Teams that work with a Scrum methodology will often rely on information such as user stories and backlogs to inform them throughout the software development process. Choose Scrum methodology if you are looking to allow your teams to manage themselves through the software development journey.
Scrums use ‘sprints’ that involve teams completing tasks within certain small time frames, enabling them to respond to customer needs more quickly and continuously. This means that if there are any issues or bugs in a product during its early stages, your Scrum team can use a sprint to resolve these issues.
Kanban methodology
If you’re looking for an agile methodology that emphasises the importance of transparent communication, then Kanban may be more suited to your business. Kanban involves organising your team’s workflow according to cards presented on a board so that the entire process is visualised for everyone involved.
Kanban helps teams to create a transparent, collaborative approach to working towards goals in a way that’s customer-focused and enables workflow flexibility. A key strength of Kanban is that it means that it helps to visualise possible backlogs during a project process, revealing any potential bottlenecks or inefficiencies in the way that your team is handling tasks.
Lean methodology
If you are looking to eliminate waste during product development, then Lean methodology may be right for you. The aim is to develop a product that meets customer needs most effectively using the fewest resources available. Like Scrum, Lean involves prioritising regular developments and updates to meet changing customer expectations. Lean methodology also involves looking at your software development processes and seeing whether they can be made more efficient using testing and continuous learning.
Agile delivery is a useful way to quickly meet customer needs while continuing to refine your product over time. As the agile philosophy requires your team to adapt to new ways of thinking about their processes and collaborations, you may wish to train them in your chosen agile methodology before beginning work according to its principles.
Fostering an environment that allows for easy collaboration and a prioritisation of customer satisfaction is key to the agile approach. However, there are many different interpretations of agile such as Scrum, Kanban and Lean, which focus on slightly different approaches to delivering a project. Which one is right for your business will depend on your specific aims, as well as the nature of your business’s processes.
