Agile Thinking Benefits and Best Practices for Enterprises

Overview of Agile Development Methodology

It is a Mindset (Attitude, Culture, leadership, and Styles) which is defined by Values called as Agile Manifesto, i.e., is guided by principles, manifested through practices (Scrum, Kanban, XP, lean). When its development is executed correctly, the satisfying customer is a primary objective. It Helps organizations to focus on meeting user needs, prioritizing delivery, helping people to collaborate.

A methodology for software development, to develop software, the client's requirements should be clear and technically feasible. Click to explore about, The role in DevOps

What is Agile Thinking?

It means to embrace the "agile values" declared by software evangelists, those values being things like flexibility, speed, customer responsiveness, change, and good engineering. There is a notable difference between doing agile and being agile. Doing it means following process and ticketing boxes.

Using it to become the best product development and management organization in the market. It encourages us to think the user first. It is an iterative approach to create high value for the user, based on feedback and change. Shift from decision making to discovery, Adopt new leadership models, understand ideation and innovation occur in all levels, bring lean and agile to the entire organization.

Software development projects Killer Terms?

The goal is not to DO SCRUM and dance all the little dances. Instead, it is to embrace continuous improvement and empirical process control (transparency, inspection, and adaptation).

Productivity

Productivity is the primary concern while working on More than two tasks simultaneously. If you are not able to prioritize your work and keep working task in parallel a situation comes whee unfinished job never gets completed. In this case, your productivity dives.

Agile Thinking Lean

There is one of the inspiring quotes, i.e., Stop Starting, start finishing. It Focuses on what is the Definition of done, i.e., precisely what's required to complete a task. It can only happen when you have minimized your work I progress only when you are completing your work what exactly Definition says.

Work-In-Progress

This means Sprint planning must be so strong that our unfinished work will not get roll over from Sprint to Sprint. What's includes in Sprint must be finished during that only. Only then it removed overburden the team with the work they can't finish.Having too Many WIP tasks seems that person is too busy but in actual leads to being less productive.

A methodology that allows continuous iteration of development and testing all through the software development life cycle. Click to explore about, Automated Testing in Agile Enterprise

How "Stop Starting Start Finishing" quote relates to Agile Thinking?

This means you can't finish what you don't start and you should never begin to what you're not committed to finish. Unfortunately, working on many high-priority features at the same time can lead to significant problems. One problem is inefficiency. Because the team is trying to show progress on everything, it bounces among several unfinished features, wasting time that it might otherwise be used to focus on and complete one requirement.

In one day we have 24 hours, during one week we have 168 hours, during a year we have 8766 hours, We have enough time to think about something innovative, Ask yourself one question on daily "Am I doing right ", "Let's go with another approach," "Make your self iterative "Never get satisfied with one of achievement, keep on changing and keep on innovating, This is the only Mantra. We must prioritize our work in four quadrants relates urgency and importance. Stop Starting Start finishing quotes tells the following scenarios -

Overflow problem
Isolate the noise
Focus on one thing until done
Know your WIP
Limit WIP
Learn how to get the inbox to zero
Stop Starting start finishing until WIP in acceptable
WIP is everything, Learn to see it
80/20 rule --> Value vs effort
Maximize the value not output
Notice how you spend your time
Determine how you want to spend your time
Iteratively improve your life

A key practice for extreme programming; it suggests that the code is developed or changed exclusively by the unit testing. Click to explore about, TDD Tools and Process

What are the characteristics of it?

The characteristics of Agile Thinking are listed below:

Customer centricity - Customer satisfaction and cycle time.
Transparency - With clarity we can inspect and adapt, Change, adaption and commitment.
Accountability and trust - Backlog features are prioritized. Openly inspect team approach seeking constant improvement. Track progress in a highly visible way.
Kaizen Culture - Constant improvement, Retrospective is a critical part of the change and adapt. Open forum includes -

- What are we doing well?

- What are we not doing well?

- How can we improve?

Team focus - Includes forming, storming, norming, performing.

Developing - Individual meet and learn about the goals, opportunity. Little shared knowledge, no trust yet, a strong desire for direction.
Storming - Conflict about the interpersonal issue, roles, goals, standards, and processes.
Norming - Team identity and cohesiveness develop. New standards evolve, new roles are adopted.
Performing - High degree of cooperation and interdependence. Goals are achieved smoothly and effectively with minimum conflict.
Servant Leadership - Create the highly productive environment by removing distraction.
Feedback - Constant feedback loop and review yourself regularly.

How do we think Agile?

Set up conditions for improvement, and Show what's happening not what should be happening. First, we should start with the following scenarios to think as agile.

Visualize our workflow
Limit WIP
Measure our performance
Improve

A style for building Data Marts, Business Intelligence application as well as Analytics application. Click to explore about, Agile Analytics Framework

What are the best practices?

The best practices to adopt Agile Thinking are listed below:

Growth Mindset
Intrinsic motivators
Outcomes management
Embrace change
Simple rules
Self Directing
Innovating Thinking

What are the benefits?

If we focus on fewer items at a time we can -

Increase productivity and deliver more
Get our customer more engaged
Have agility to adjust when changes occur
Limit the cost of delay
Lower our cycle times
Agile synthesis

Design thinking

Generate the solution ideas, or we can say its a framework for delivering a great user experience to our clients. Design thinking offers a new way to think about their problems and solutions.It includes understand (empathy), Explore (Diverge), Build (prototype), Measure (evaluate).

User centralized design

"Design the solution." When we have done all the research on design next step to design the solution, Convert the innovative idea into reality.

Scrum

"Develop the software." A significant focus of Scrum may be empowering teams, but it's also about giving management better visibility into team performance and results.

DevOps

"Deliver the release" Keep on delivering in small chunks or iteration, Keep Following Iterative cycle.

A type of testing in which individual units or functions of software testing. Click to explore about, Unit Testing Techniques

What are the key Pillars?

The key pillars of an Agile Enterprise Team are:

People
Process
Tools

Achieving organization Agility

Start with the purpose
Visualize your work
Set - up right operating rhythm - 90 days planning, Sprint Planning, Daily Standup
Use continuous improvement tools

Conclusion

Adopting Agile Thinking results in Increased customer satisfaction, Operational Efficiency and Engagement of Teams. To know more about its approach we advise taking the following steps -