What does it mean to be agile?

We’ve all heard about “agile” but do you really know what it means?

  For many years, hierarchy was a big deal in companies. But times are changing, organizations and companies want to be more flexible. At 26lights, since the beginning, we have adopted the agile project management method. It means that we value human communication and feedbacks to produce working results.

A set of values and principles

  Basically, agile is a set of values and principles. Those values and principles were written in the Agile Manifesto in 2001 by 17 tech developers in the US. It’s not quite a methodology since it avoids prescribing any particular methods or procedures but it guides you on how to choose the right methods and procedures for your team. The agile way of working is a flexible one. It gives a foundation for teams to make decisions that give better result. Through this kind of doing, we value:

• individuals and interactions over processes and tools,
• working software over comprehensive documentation,
• customer collaboration over contract negotiation,
• responding to a change over following a plan.

 

Focus on what you deliver

  Agile working is a way of focusing only on what you deliver. It started as a project management in the IT industry, in order to deliver better software development but it’s now spreading to numerous industries. Being agile is being able to continually adapt, to constantly make improvements to the way you work. It aims to reduce the time of the development project to respond more quickly to the client’s requests, that evolve regularly.

Scrum methodology

  Teams can follow some methodologies in order to be agile. Such as the scrum methodology. Scrum specifies a number of ways for teams to work, it gives you methods and processes for producing working results. This includes things like having daily standup meetings, fixed length sprints, product demos and retrospectives. In this methodology, projects are cut in sprints with short-term goals. A MVP will be quickly tested in order to be continuously improved.