Let us tell you a story about British Telecom (BT) today.
British Telecom is a British multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It has operations in around 180 countries and is the largest provider of fixed-line, broadband, and mobile services in the UK, and also provides subscription television and IT services. Before 2004, British Telecom was having a lot of fuss. Too many people were placing their requirements and all of the requirements were of high priority, development deadlines were hard to meet, deployment was going in vain for almost every release. In 2004, a new CIO comes in the scene and made some changes to the traditional method. And the results will literally make you roll your eyes. The delivery cycle reduced to 90 days from 12 months, employees started to set priorities right and focus on requirements accordingly, the developer morale and motivation were increased.
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Want to know what change did the CIO made? He changed the traditional waterfall model and depended on Agile methodologies completely.
You must be having a hard time believing it right? How one methodology can create this huge difference for an organization? Well, this is not only one organization that got blessed by Agile methodologies. Cisco, as well, switched to Agile methodologies from the waterfall model back in 2015. That resulted in a 40% decrease in critical and major defects, a 16% decrease in Defect Rejected Ratio, a 14% improvement in Defect Removal Efficiency and on the top of it like a cherry, there is no more overtime! Isn’t it amazing?
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But how does Agile do it? How does Agile bring such a huge benefit in business?
In this blog, we are going to tell you about the ways Agile can benefit your business. Before we start with that, let us tell you a little bit about Agile. Although you know it already from our previous blogs, it’s always good to pause and rewind a bit. Right?
So as you know, Agile is a methodology or a set of principles that help an organization to run in a smooth way.
According to Agile manifesto, Agile methodology includes these 12 principles:
- Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
- Welcome changing requirements, even in late development.
- Deliver working software frequently (weeks rather than months).
- Close daily cooperation between business people and developers.
- Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted.
- A face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location).
- Working software is the primary measure of progress.
- Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace.
- Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design.
- Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.
- Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing
- Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective and adjusts
Benefits of Agile Culture to the Business
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Faster Failures:
Does it sound a bit absurd? Of course, when a project starts you don’t really calculate the chances of failure. Isn’t it?
Fail Forward Fast is a methodology that implies that this failure happens quickly from which you can learn and simply move on. Agile can produce the application incrementally and businesses can experience return almost immediately. The application starts producing Return on Investment (ROI) quickly and with a small investment.
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Faster Time To Market:
The Agile framework emphasizes on Minimal Marketable Product or MMP.
An MMP is a fully functioning piece of software. It contains the minimum feature set that a user needs. Also, It allows a business to get to market faster and be concerned about adding future features. Hence, you won’t have to spend months waiting to ship a product with all the facilities you think a user wants. You focus on delivering what they want right now.
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Organizational Transparency:
Once you are following the Agile methodology, that means you are working towards a common goal and achieve what they aim to achieve. There is no politics as such and the openness of the office environment flattens up the hierarchy.
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Greater Employee Satisfaction:
To follow the Agile methodology properly, the employees need to be heavily engaged in the process and decision making. Here, teams work as a unit that feeds to the knowledge of each and every employee. Hence, the team is productive and completely engaged in the process which breeds a different level of employee satisfaction.
Not only this, the employees are provided with a channel of work by which they can plan and perform accordingly without any management interruptions. Isn’t it amazing?
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Save Money:
When the risk is lower, the organization is embracing changes and having a faster time to market, what does that conclude? In a nutshell, the business is saving a lot of money. And when you are building exactly what the customers want without making thousands of additions, it’s good only for cost reduction. Isn’t it?
Overview:
Now you understand why going Agile is a need of the hour. Right? But you won’t be able to go to Agile properly till the time you don’t know all about it.agil
And the easiest way to do that? Get yourself Agile certified of course!
