Agile Approach
The agile approach is an iterative and incremental approach to developing products and services. The team defines a loose scope at the beginning of the initiative to maintain flexibility and maximize the likelihood of success. The team carries out the work in short cycles. Each cycle or iteration can improve or add components to the previous version of the product. This way, you can focus on continuous improvement to develop products and services.
Additionally, the Agile approach emphasizes the principles and values of collaboration, adaptability to change, and team self-organization. Thus, the team can adjust the product backlog throughout the project taking into account the customer feedback. Moreover, Agile encourages the use of cross-functional teams. This multidisciplinary team includes all the functions necessary to develop the product or service. This way, the team can quickly adjust according to customer feedback.
Agile Frameworks
There are several agile frameworks, such as, for example, Scrum, XP, Kanban, and Crystal. However, each of these approaches has its specific characteristics. Therefore, the team should select the framework considering the specific context of the project.
Moreover, agile is a set of principles, practices, and values. A multidisciplinary team collaboratively develops a product or solves a problem, adopting an iterative and incremental method. Each agile team can adopt a different combination of agile practices, techniques, conventions, and procedures.
In the following section, we will explore some of the most popular frameworks.
Scrum
Scrum is the most popular agile framework. This is most likely because it is very simple to use and implement. Specifically, Scrum uses a flexible, progressive approach to developing products. In other words, scrum teams adopt an iterative and incremental product development approach. Moreover, they rely on short, fixed-duration sprints.
Furthermore, scrum emphasizes self-organization. In other words, the team has the autonomy to make all the decisions necessary to develop the product. Likewise, it encourages clear and constant communication. Thus, Scrum team members collaborate daily to synchronize their work and inspect their progress. On many occasions, it is not possible to use scrum in its entirety. However, many people adopt part of Scrum’s events, artifacts, rules, and roles.
Kanban
Kanban is a flow-based agile approach. Teams rely on Kanban boards to visualize work, set work-in-progress limits, eliminate bottlenecks, and optimize their flow. This agile approach also helps to reduce waste and therefore optimize costs. Finally, Kanban teams promote transparency and continuous improvement.
Scrumban
Scrumban combines Scrum and Kanban components. Teams rely on scrum events and artifacts. However, they also adopt work-in-progress limits and kanban boards to optimize workflow.
Lean teams’ main concern is to reduce waste. Another main concern of the Lean teams is to maximize the value delivered to the client. During the project, the team verifies the process to look for opportunities to improve and get rid of the work that is not necessary.
Agile Approach versus Waterfall Approach
Waterfall or plan-driven teams develop products with a linear or top-down approach. Thus, at the beginning of the project, the team establishes scope, deadline, and cost objectives. On the other hand, the team delivers the product all at once at the end of the project. Moreover, the team develops the project in phases. Each phase will typically begin after the end of the previous phase.
Known and stable environments set the perfect conditions for using Waterfall. As a consequence, project teams will typically use Waterfall to develop real products, such as a house.
The probability of a project delivery with a waterfall approach being a success depends on the possibility of having detailed information to define a detailed scope when the project is starting. Since, the definition of scope, and costs in an agile project are done throughout the project, less detailed information is required in the first moments of the project. This leads to a more flexible product development.
In waterfall projects, teams normally only find changes when the project is already in progress. Since, most changes have a big impact on the project, not being able to see them early can hurt the project. Moreover, most projects have little to no possibility to implement the changes. On the other hand, agile approaches welcome changes, since they keep looking for them to adjust the product to maximize the value delivered to the client. That being said, the agile approach is more flexible and more adjusted to a context of constant change and full of uncertainty.
Advantages of the Agile Approach
The advantages of the agile approach are endless. One of the main advantages is the focus on the client and his satisfaction. In other words, agile teams keep the focus on constantly delivering products to the clients, collecting their feedback, and incorporating the changes increasing customer satisfaction and value delivered to customers. Another main concern of agile approaches is to keep the team motivated. This is done by promoting a trusting environment and a good communication method with constant sharing between team members. This will lead to better products with fewer problems. Another important advantage of agile is the focus on constantly adjusting and adapting to become better. The team used events like to Scrum retrospective, for example, to analyse what could be done better in the next sprint.
Drawbacks of the Agile Approach
Agile approaches also have some drawbacks, especially in some specific situations. In some situations, the planning effort is necessary to be able to secure all the opportunities and decrease the uncertainty of some situations. For example, imagine that you need hardware equipment that takes 2 months to produce and 2 extra months to arrive. If you don’t order the equipment in advance, you most probably will not have it when you need it. Agile also relies on constant communication and sharing, but if teams are not in the same space this is hard to achieve. Lack of project documentation can look good in the short term but in the long run can be a big problem, especially when the product is already in the next phase and the team was demobilized.
Conclusion of the Agile Approach
The world is changing every day more quickly than ever. Every day we new things happening. As a consequence, teams need to adapt and adjust to all those changes, and is getting harder to achieve that.
Agile approaches make teamwork easier because are more flexible and let changes be incorporated more easily. To sum up, every project can benefit from using agile approaches even is only part.