Is your business agile? Yes? Are you sure? Do you mean that your IT team is agile or do you mean that the whole of your business is working in an agile way? I keep speaking to people who say “we are an agile company” but, upon further discussion, find that there is a disconnect between tech and their wider business.
What we are really talking about here is ‘agile thinking’. When a business dreams up a new idea that develops into a project, what is the defined goal? Often, that goal is declared to be the Minimum Viable Product (i.e. the earliest point that the business wants to show the new idea to its customers); there is no iterative deployment of the idea to customers … but then the tech team works on the project in an agile way, delivering the project in stages to the business. What a waste of opportunity. The IT team, by delivering the project iteratively to the business, benefits from ensuring they are on track, etc., but the business misses out on an enormous opportunity. Why hasn’t the business released the product to the customer iteratively too? Why hasn’t the business worked out a way of getting their new idea out in stages? Why hasn’t the business started to reap the benefits of an early release to market?
If you were a start up, continually looking for investment, you would try to get something to market as early as possible, then develop it further – because you need to make money to fund the next stage. Most companies start small, but most have also forgotten about this way of working; they invest huge sums of money in projects that they ‘think’ will be beneficial and go with a big bang delivery.
I heard a lovely story at Agile on the Beach that exemplifies this approach. I forget who told the story so cannot check on the details, but it goes something like this:
Bob was an entrepreneur. He had loads of business ideas. One was to sell bird tables. Chances are, if your business was going into this market, they would buy a variety of bird tables, build a website, do some advertising, etc. What this guy did was build a simple html webpage advertising the concept. He then promoted it and saw how much interest there was. He did this not just with bird tables, but lots of other products with similar flat web pages. Then, those that got interest, were fleshed out a bit more (including sourcing some stock!). He spent very little on each idea until he had proof it would generate profit.
If only your development team works in an agile way, you’re business is missing most of the benefits.