Is Agile Working Methodologies Really Working?

You are well aware of agile working methodologies already. Aren’t you?

After knowing about how it works, you must be thinking, is it really a question?

A method that makes task management and team communication so easy, how can that not work? How on earth is it possible?

Well, imagine this. At your home, you used to cook on a gas burner before. You realized that it is consuming a lot of time. That’s when you brought a new induction home. You are absolutely elated with it because you are being able to save so much time while cooking. But, on the other hand, your mother and wife are not as happy with it. According to them, gas burner food tastes far better than the induction food. Plus, the gas burner was much easier to handle. Both of them think that induction is not worth it.

That is the same with Agile working methodologies as well. While you think it’s perfect, some people will always have a doubt about it.

Once an organization switches to Agile  methodology all of a sudden, it takes time for the employees to cope up with the new changes and the environment for both positive and negative reasons. Hence, sometimes the organizations feel that switching to Agile methodology was not really worth it.

But is it the only reason?

In this blog, we are going to discuss the pros and cons of agile working methodologies and how to implement agile working in your office environment. If you have some solutions as well which you think will be beneficial for the readers, you can put them in the comment section below!

In the world of technology, every new one has its own cons along with pros. Agile methodologies, too, are no exception.

Let’s check them out first before we go in-depth.

Agile Methodology Working Pros And Cons

There are a lot of ways by which Agile can help you to revamp your workplace completely. The benefits of Agile working are as follows:

Pros Of Agile Methodology Working

• Team Engagement: Agile gives the entire team a lot of opportunities before, during and after every sprint. Also, the agile methodology allows a high volume of communication between the client and the project team. In this way, the team understands the client requirement completely and delivers the best product to them.
• Transparency: Under the Agile working methodology, the client gets to be involved with the project throughout, from prioritizing features to the review sessions. In this way, they can be clear about this fact that they are being able to see an ongoing process for the matter of maintaining transparency with the organization they are dealing with.
• Quick delivery: With the help of fixed and scheduled sprints, new features can be delivered to the clients very quickly and frequently. In this way, you can achieve the highest level of client satisfaction.
• Improves Quality: Agile allows you to break down the project into small units that are much more manageable. With this, the project team can focus on high-quality development, testing, and collaboration which improves the quality of the product by default.

Sounds pretty amazing. Isn’t it? What could be the possible cons after that?
Well, let’s hear that out!

Cons Of Agile Methodologies Working

• Poor Resource Planning: The Agile idea states that the project team will not know what the end result will look like. Hence, predicting resources like the cost of the project, estimated time to deliver, money to be invested are nearly impossible.
• Limited Documentation: When a project is completely based on Agile methodology, the documentation happens throughout the project. Not at the beginning of it. Hence, it becomes less detailed.
• Fragmented Output: Since the team divides the entire process into small cycles, the delivery becomes faster. But again, for so many different cycles the output often becomes fragmented rather than one single concrete one.
• No Finite End: Since there is no vision of what the final product looks like, that denotes that the project has no finite end.
• Difficult Measurement: Agile working methods allow you only to look through the process when it’s ongoing. It mostly follows the see as you go approach. This brings you to a point where you really can’t set much KPIs for you and your team. Hence, performance measurement becomes difficult.

From the above points, you can see that the pros of agile looks so rose coated from outside. But once you actually start working on it, the pros don’t take much time to turn into cons.

You might have gotten all confused by now and asking yourself- “What does it mean then? Does Agile working methods really work? Or not?”

Well, Agile is a really well planned and tricky concept. To build a proper agile work environment, you need to be well aware of some agile working tips. So, here they come!

Agile Methodologies Working Tips

You know that Agile methodology was derived to benefit different organizations. Agile Future Forum has come up with five golden rules which will help the organizations to work upon traditional barriers.

1. Be Business-led

The business needs to lead agile working practices. They should focus on this fact that it should meet the need of the business, the employees and the customers and implement working practices which are suitable for them.

2. Understand the needs of the business and the workforce

For this, you need to have a clear idea of business objectives and use that to develop an ideal workforce. Also, you need to put effort into understanding what the employees value most and work with them to develop an agile work environment.

3. Develop the agile working model bottom-up

While developing the agile ways of working, you should focus on one single business unit at a time instead of looking towards the entire business model.

4. Consider big, strategic changes

When you are implementing agile methods in your organization, you need to make your employees aware of the big changes which are going to come along with that. For that, you need to be well versed in how to introduce agile working in your organization.

The best way to do it is by making your employees certified in Agile.

5. Educate leadership first

Business leaders are the faces of any organization. Hence, educating them all about the Agile methodology is a must, so that they can pass on the knowledge to the other employees.

Closing Thoughts

A study presented at a conference on information systems held at New Zeeland shows that people working in an Agile environment share a lot of information. This contributes to shared mental models and helping behaviours.

Not only this, fast information flow contributes to people who have shared thinking and common ways of understanding. It helps team members to stay aware of each other’s needs and provide support, assistance, and guidance on tasks.

After getting accustomed and adjusted with the year-old traditional methods of working, you may find the Agile work environment a little tricky. But for the matter of fact, technology and wine aren’t the same things which get better with age. In the world of technology, new is always better.

To promote agile working, you can encourage your employees to go for proper agile working training and certification. There are a lot of certifications like Certified Agile ITSM Manager, Certified Agile Scrum Master, Certified Agile Scrum Foundation which they can opt for.

Then, let’s buckle up to build full-fledged agile workspaces across the world because it truly is working! Shall we?