What is Agile?

Overview

Agile is an approach that’s commonly used in software development teams to help improve team cohesion and efficiency. It’s a way of working rather than a defined framework to follow. The values of Agile aim to give guidance on what’s most important in effective teams, such as favouring people and interactions, working software, customer collaboration and responding to change over traditional processes and tools, documentation, contracts and following project plans. A theme of Agile working means you concentrate on delivering small, incremental changes (iterations) to customers rather than one large change at the end, so you can gather feedback faster and make changes with less risk. Although it's been commonly adopted by software development teams, here's how plenty of other teams could use it:

(Image credit: Matt LeMay)

Introduction

What’s this Agile thing all about? Why do I keep hearing about it? Why should I consider some of the ideas that Agile conveys? Once you’ve read this, if you have more questions about how this could work then please get in touch with one of the Agile Coaches.

Put simply, you;

Make a list of all your work [see Establishing Healthy Backlogs]
Understand the effort (size) of individual tasks
Set your priorities
Deliver something early (setting a time-boxed period to deliver them may help)
Get real feedback from your stakeholders/customers/users
Adapt the plan for the next iteration as a result of that feedback

Traditionally applied to software delivery, it’s now taking over everywhere from house building to baking.

(Image credit: https://medium.com/@ahuijsen/scrum-and-the-agile-manifesto-f35fbbd4d0c7)

All of the items above are important, and shouldn't be ignored; however we value the items on the left more. "Over", not "instead of".

so...

Imagine you’re building a house. Or making a wedding cake. You talk to your client right at the start and ask them lots of questions, get all the information you need and then tell them you’ll be back when the job is done. When it’s finished, you show your finished product to the client. They’re not happy - it’s not at all what they wanted. You’re confused because you got all their requirements upfront and did exactly as they asked. That’s the nature of people - they change their minds, their circumstances change, often don’t really know what they want until they see something or perhaps struggle to communicate well what it is they actually want.

This is where working in an Agile way comes in. So instead, imagine you first spend a few days drawing out a floor plan, or baking a simple cupcake in vanilla and then talk to your client. They can give you real feedback there and then - “No, I want four bedrooms now, not three.” “Hmm actually the vanilla is nice but can you also bake a lemon so I can try that too?”

This is the main feature of Agile - do something small, get real feedback from your customer that it’s the right thing to be doing, then iterate and make it better or make the changes they’ve asked for before committing to large and potentially expensive mistakes.

Whilst Agile is the overall way of working, Scrum and Kanban are frameworks of Agile.

Agile at Holiday Extras

It’s worth noting that whilst the individual frameworks (Scrum and Kanban) seem to have a lot of rules and can appear daunting, it’s really all delivering value incrementally. You can pick and choose what works for you from both methodologies.

Holiday Extras does have Agile Coaches who can spend time with internal teams, understanding how they work. They can then suggest ways that Agile working could benefit teams and help them choose the style that works for them - in order to help get the team performing at an even higher level using whatever method fits.

Summary

That’s a lot to take in! Remember, the idea of Agile is actually to make things simpler and clearer for teams whilst delivering small, incremental but valuable output to the customer. The specifics can be tricky to grasp at first but with practice and some further reading and guidance, any team can take the parts that work for them to perform at a higher level and have happier end users.