Why Agile Is Great for Your Business | David Tzemach
Agile project management is an excellent alternative to traditional methods to address the customer's needs and deliver business value from the beginning of the project. This article describes the main benefits of Agile for both the customer and the business.
Increased Project Control
Agile frameworks such as Scrum allow organizations to benefit from complete transparency of their teams and progress. Scrum meetings enable the organization to receive feedback regarding the quality of the work done. Scrum artifacts such as burn-down charts and product backlogs provide a clear view of the completed work and what is still left to be delivered. Another aspect of project control is using more relevant and accurate metrics to estimate time and cost, evaluate project performance and determine the quality of each delivery.
Higher Customer Satisfaction
Development is visible, transparent, and flexible to change based on customer feedback. It allows:
Incremental releases of the product at the end of every sprint.
Early access by the customer to the product during its development.
Immediate sharing of the customer experience of the software for quick adjustments as needed, created by continuous feedback loops.
High Product Quality
Quality is a significant factor in Agile development because it directly impacts the customer’s satisfaction. One considerable aspect of quality is testing. Testing in Agile is integrated into the development cycle to ensure the product meets customer expectations, and it also allows for necessary adjustments as required.
Here are a few more examples that can demonstrate how we can promote quality in the Agile environment:
Agile development is based on a Definition of Done (known as DoD) that ensures that each delivery meets a specific quality standard.
Incorporating continuous integration and daily testing into the development process allows the development team to address issues faster.
Agile development embraces the use of automated frameworks such as CI/CD.
Self-Organization Increases Team Morale
Agile projects are based on self-organized teams that allow each member to contribute equally. Being part of such a working environment will enable people to be creative, innovative and share their knowledge. In addition, cross-functional teams allow team members to acquire new skills, tools, and technologies that aid their personal development.
Efficient Risk Reduction
Agile frameworks deliver rapid releases starting from the first sprint, so there is less chance of complete project failure. Quick releases ensure a short time frame between the initial project investment and knowing if the product works.
Predictable Deliverables
By using specific time-boxes for the development cycles and their respective activities, the team can deliver incremental releases quickly and frequently, increasing business value and ROI. Time-boxing in Agile development also allows the business to predict costs and timelines of each sprint by maintaining team allocation and sprint length throughout the project.
Increased Collaboration and Ownership Among Stakeholders
In an Agile project, we can expect to see increased collaboration and ownership among key stakeholders (development teams, project managers, senior management, etc.) who work closely together. Using this approach increases visibility and reduces assumptions due to missing information or ambiguous requirements.