Agile is a buzz word of the 21st century, specifically in the IT industry. Yes, we all know the nitty-gritty details of the most popular agile process a.k.a. Scrum and there are a lot of writings available on this. Hence, I’m not going to repeat those process details. Rather, I’d like to explain Agile from a holistic view.
Globalization and rapid evolution of technology, change our needs and lifestyle more frequently than ever before. In 21st century the changes in our life come so fast and furious that our solution plan and implementation often become outdated and obsolete by the time we deliver them to the end-users. The traditional long term plan often found to be inadequate and failed to fulfill the need of end-users in the end. Hence, the organizations must be adaptive to these changes. This is where the need of Agility comes into the picture. We must be agile enough in our planning and development to adapt new changes as they come in our way.
Even though all argue that Agile is a new process, I’d humbly differ with them! We, humans, are by born Agile and that’s how we survived by adapting the changes and by completing with others. We have always been iteratively adapting the new changes. The only difference is the timeframe of each iteration. Previously, our iterations were longer, e.g. 5 Years Development Plan, Annual Product Development plan, etc. As the changes are more frequent, we had to adjust the timeframe to shorter ones to accommodate the changes. Another major difference is that we used to deliver a complete project through a long single iteration while today’s agile process consists of multiple shorter iterations for a release. I must fore say that in the future, our current iteration timeframe may not suffice to adapt the changes! One day it might so happen that our iteration timeframe would be as short as a day or two!
The success of agility lies greatly on two things – 1. How quickly we are addressing the market needs and 2. How best we are addressing the market needs to be ahead of our competitors. Agile is most suitable for such a quick turnaround. Out-of-the-box solutions are the key to success while addressing a problem or customer need. Instead of improving the horse carts (existing product), Henry Ford introduced steam-engine to address the need of mobility which is an example of Strategic agility. Similarly, Operational agility will help us to fine-tune our existing solutions to better address the customer needs over our competitors. Google’s search engine and online advertisement are still #1 through operational agility. Nokia, on the contrary, failed by focusing only on the operational agility and not being innovative enough to best address the market needs. Hence, we must be agile in both operationally as well as strategically to succeed.
As human evolution continues so does the changes to our products and solutions. Therefore, the need of Agile was there, is there and will be there.
