How agile is Agile? Project management for the digital age

For most people, a group of techies talking shop can be about as off-putting as a group of Star Trek fans talking Klingon.

The good news is you don’t need to learn C++ or Javascript or PHP or any of those other obscure programming languages to work with developers. All you need to know is the basics of Agile, a wildly successful project management methodology for software development. And trust me, it’s much less daunting than learning Klingon.

It is hardly an overstatement to say Agile methodology divides the world in two: those who like it, and those who haven’t tried it yet.

Agile is the exact opposite of top-down planning, which hasn’t proven flexible or responsive enough to keep up with the fast-paced nature of digital product development, which requires the integration of the work of multiple teams with about a gazillion lines of code and complex interdependencies.

How does Agile do that? Simple. It decentralises planning. Everyone involved has a stake in the planning process.

Scrum Masters are facilitators of a collaborative process in which everyone gets a say and everyone has something to contribute. Of course, there are rules, and there is a structure. And those rules, that structure, is what you need to know if you are going to go Agile. Here’s my quick run down on the basics of an Agile process:

Product Owners, aka those who must be satisfied. Product Owners are the champions for their product, they define what they want and all of the bells and whistles they want on it, prioritize the work to be done by the development team accordingly and work with them to see what they are delivering is what they want, at least within technical and time limitations. When you commission an Agile Delivery Manager to deliver a project for you, you become the Product Owner. Stay involved! We need your continuing input. You are in for an awesome ride.

Sprints are basically what they sound like. A sprint is a short, sharp, focused drive to achieve certain goals within a predetermined time frame, usually a week, two, three or four. They allow for larger tasks to be broken up during Sprint Planning sessions and handled in bite-sized chunks. Projects backlogs will be broken down into sprints backlogs for ease of digestion.

Sprint Demos and Retrospectives. Sprints offer periodical opportunities to assess how the project is going. At the end of each sprint, the functionalities that have been built are demonstrated and reviewed. Then everyone involved gets a chance to ask the questions that are the mantra of Agile: What worked well? What could we do differently? What have I learned? What still puzzles me? This constant reassessment and the feedback it generates is the heart of Agile methodology, and means the process becomes more effective and efficient with time.

Daily standups are again exactly what they sound like they are. You get together quickly each day at the same time to touch base, tell the others what did you work on yesterday, what are you working on today, highlight any possible issues to be addressed and resolved outside of the morning standup sessions. Daily standups often mean problems are uncovered and addressed earlier rather than later.

This is the heart of the Agile process in a nutshell. Over the next few months I will be writing a series of blogs covering different aspects of Agile methodologies, keeping it simple and Klingon-free. Please feel free to comment below, ask me about any aspect of Agile that intrigues you or confuses you and share this blog with anyone you think this could benefit.

Oh, and as they say on a certain TV franchise, live long and prosper the agile way!