The Agile method has become a mainstay of the business world. Using this technique, you can make your projects more dynamic and responsive to customer feedback. But what is agile, and how can you use it? Read on as we delve further into the topic.
What Is Agile? (…and what isn’t it?)
Depending on who you ask, agile is either a methodology for project management, or it is an entire philosophy. In either case, agile is concerned with how to manage projects in a feedback-driven and incremental process. Agile began life as a method for managing software development specifically, but its principles have since been adapted in a variety of different contexts.
(TOP: Image from KMServe Enterprises).
Agile project management is now widely used throughout the world of business; its core tenets are applicable far beyond the bounds of software development. Given how easy it is for businesses today to gather feedback data from their customers, and how much more advanced our data processing and analytics capabilities are today, a feedback-driven approach like agile makes a lot of sense.
But the benefits of taking the agile approach extend beyond putting feedback to good use. The agile approach also encourages incremental changes that quite literally make your project development more agile.
Agile is not restricted to software development anymore. However, while agile can be used to manage projects of all types, you should not view it as a rigid set of rules. As long as you adhere to the core principles of agile development, which we will outline below, you can manage your projects more efficiently and more dynamically.
Priorities
In order to succeed with the agile approach, you need to learn to prioritize. Agile project management is all about being dynamic and reacting to changing circumstances. If you aren’t able to prioritize efficiently, your project is soon going to become a tangled mess, and you will inevitably trip up as a result.
- Individuals over processes: One of the most important principles of agile project management is that your individual customers are ultimately the most important consideration. Agile project management encourages you to adapt in response to customer feedback. The experience that your customer has is more important than the process it takes to get there. Obviously, you cannot sustain an unprofitable supply chain for too long, but as long as you stay within reasonable limits, your focus should always be on the end user’s experience.
- Interactions over tools: If you want to create a truly dynamic working environment, you need to actually interact with the other people involved in your project. While there are plenty of productivity tools that are great for checking in and for handling day-to-day communications, you need to be pairing these with face-to-face meetings to ensure that everyone is on the same page throughout your project development process. More importantly, if you want your project to be dynamic and responsive to customer feedback, face-to-face meetings where you can properly discuss any issues are essential.
- Collaboration over negotiation: Whether you are making an internal decision amongst your team, or you are reacting to feedback from your customers, your priority should always be to collaborate with them, combining ideas and knowing when a suggestion will significantly improve the end result of your project. Negotiation, on the other hand, is when, after collaborating and bringing your ideas together, you negotiate which bits of your ideas you can live without, and end up stripping away the essence of both in the name of compromise.
- A dynamic approach and a willingness to adapt over a rigid plan: Having a plan is good, and any experienced project manager knows that projects can live or die on the strength of their initial plans. However, agile project management encourages project managers to view their plans as being much more fluid than usual. In order to take advantage of the agile method, you need to be willing to throw out your existing plans and adapt in response to changing circumstances. You cannot be dynamic while also rigidly sticking to a plan.
Kanbanize has a fantastic article about how to break down large goals and tasks into smaller agile tasks. The Kanbanize software solutions come with a variety of built-in tools to assist project managers in implementing the agile method for managing their projects. By structuring your project as a collection of smaller agile tasks, you will find it much easier to adapt on the fly in a way that respects the priorities outlined above.
Guiding principles of Agile Project Management
The founders of the agile method have outlined what they consider to be the most important principles of agile project management. We have summarized the most important of these principles for you below:
- Your first priority should always be the satisfaction of the end-user.
- You should welcome constructive criticism and be willing to adapt in response.
- You should aim to deliver regular updates to your customers and staff to keep them informed of progress.
- You should be meeting internally as often as possible.
- Face-to-face meetings are essential. No remote communication method can ever truly compete.
Agile project management encourages you to let your customers direct the evolution of your projects through their feedback. By letting customers help you shape the process, you can benefit from their insight and deliver a final product tailored to their desires.How
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