Have you heard of Agile as an approach to challenge traditional methods of working?
Would you like to improve your company's workflow and find more effective ways to deliver tasks?
Then, you should use agility methodologies in your company. Learn about its many benefits below.
An Ally in the Digital Age
“To be successful in the digital age you need to adopt Agile practices and make a profound paradigm shift in the business world,” says Ingrid Astiz Jensen, CEO & Co-Founder at Wise Work. “Working automatically, without questioning ourselves, investigating the substance of the problem, creating alternatives or validating hypotheses, is a luxury that we can no longer afford,” she adds.
What are agile methodologies?
Agile is an approach that was born about two decades ago in the software world, when leading developers got together and produced the Agile Manifesto with four main premises. Currently, these four elements are very popular in the world of Human Resources and Internal Communications.
Take a glimpse of them, according to Modern Agile:
1. Make People Awesome. In Modern Agile we ask how we can make people in our ecosystem awesome. This includes the people who use, make, buy, sell or fund our products or services. We learn their context and pain points, what holds them back and what they aspire to achieve. How can we make them awesome?
2. Make Safety a Prerequisite. Safety is both a basic human need and a key to unlocking high performance. We actively make safety a prerequisite by establishing safety before engaging in any hazardous work. We protect people’s time, information, reputation, money, health and relationships. And we endeavor to make our collaborations, products and services resilient and safe.
3. Experiment & Learn Rapidly. You can’t make people awesome or make safety a prerequisite if you aren’t learning. We learn rapidly by experimenting frequently. We make our experiments “safe to fail” so we are not afraid to conduct more experiments. When we get stuck or aren’t learning enough, we take it as a sign that we need to learn more by running more experiments.
4. Deliver Value Continuously. Anything that isn’t delivered isn’t helping anyone become more awesome or safe. In modern agile we ask ourselves, “How could valuable work be delivered faster?” Delivering value continuously requires us to divide larger amounts of value into smaller pieces that may be delivered safely now rather than later.
Use agile methodologies for culture transformation
There are several agile frameworks that can be performed to empower an organization, including Scrum, Kanban, and XP.
The right combination for each team will depend on your needs and goals. What’s true is that agility has enormous potential to transform the culture of a company, make a difference and create a competitive advantage.
“Agile can take different forms, but it basically consists of the ability to adapt quickly or even anticipate the context and lead change. In the broadest sense of its definition, Agile affects strategic design, operations, technology and innovation, and the ability of an organization to innovate in the incorporation of products, processes and business models”, clarifies Michael Cusmano, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
At Oxean we work together with our partner Wise Work, so that the different areas of a company can make a situation analysis, learn about alternatives and choose which agile practices can bring them more benefits.
Making this change in an imposed way or applying by the book methodologies can generate more tensions and losses, so we suggest making a process of practical changes, while working on changing minds, the ways of communicating and also modifying making decision dynamics.
The Benefits of Implementing Agile Methodologies
Next, we will highlight the main benefits that companies report when implementing the Agile approach, according to the 2020 report by Version One:
