One of the main advantages of agile development is the ability to adapt and respond to changing requests in a short time. This comes useful in the IT and Telco businesses where, due to the market trends and technology advancements, the ability to adapt to the needs of the customers became one of the crucial characteristics of the companies. Agile delivery methods are also highly used by leading companies in industries such as pharmaceuticals, banking, marketing, the auto industry, aerospace, etc.

The most important challenges come during the initial phase of transformation or formation of the agile organization, mostly related to the business culture, the change of old habits, and the attitude towards the new way of working. The agile alignment with the corporate procedures and with other teams working in traditional methods could cause wasteful interactions in the flow. However, with support from management, some coaching effort, honesty, and transparency in communication, all the processes could be aligned to everyone’s satisfaction. The common understanding of everyone in the company should be that the ideas and solutions are initialized from the operational levels and in the collaboration with the top management, spread throughout the company.

When it comes to the delivery level, last year we had the pleasure to see how it looks to transform a team composed exclusively of developers and join colleagues from quality assurance, solution design, and a product owner (a person familiar with the business). This transformation increased the speed of the information flow, cooperation within the team, and the ability to independently deliver the whole functionality as requested. The feedback from everyone who participated in the process was very positive.

If we look at the time-to-market values with the incremental framework such as Scrum, we could see that the agile approach to development shows significant benefits compared to the traditional methods of delivery. Having as an outcome faster delivery, increased customer satisfaction, and higher quality of the product, it is easy to understand why teams enjoy working within an agile environment.

The way Agile Manifesto is structured brings a focus on human interactions and actual productivity over the traditional, bureaucratical procedures. However, it focuses primarily on the delivery segment and not so much on the designing phase of the requirements before the development itself. Stakeholders sometimes have difficulties in reaching a consensus on what are their needs in terms of functionality, which increases the overall complexity of the initial phase and poses a risk of frequent changes during the development. Some additional values and principles could reflect that part of the flow as well.

When I look at past experiences, I can see that the elements of agile delivery can be applied in almost all aspects of life, both private and personal. Incremental delivery, quality-oriented and client-oriented products, prioritized list of actions, and the ability to adapt to change. People are not aware of how much of the agile principles they use in day-to-day activities. However, there have been some exceptions such as a role of a sea freight operator, where I was not allowed to be too creative due to strict import-export customs rules and procedures.

I will be a bit subjective and relate this question to my current role. All the mentioned variants above are interesting and most of them are predecessors of Scrum. Scrum is a light framework, which gives a lot of freedom to the teams to organize themselves according to their preferences and it puts an emphasis on the people. The second one would be Kanban due to its simplicity to understand and use.