Agile software development is a set of principles for software development in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continuous improvement, and it encourages rapid and flexible response to change. Agile itself has never defined any specific methods to achieve this, but many have grown up as a result and have been recognised as being ‘Agile’.
Wikipedia
According to many opinions there are plenty advantages of agile software development principles as well as some limitations of them. We are definitely not encouraging you to trust those who state something like “Agile doesn’t work”. So our confidence about Scrum, Kanban and other Agile methodologies can be explained by the fact that they are very often:
- Affordable
Minimal waste of time and money on architecture design. Most customers are business people and they’d better understand and participate with “something that is working right now” information rather than with important, but formal one, e.g. documentation.
- Simple
Again, it is easy to understand for non-tech person. Or even, it says, Agile is “sexy”. The other way to say it is that Agile is easy to show and to sell to most customers. You don’t need to use specific words as а part of a development process explanation.
- Safe
Small incremental releases, integrated testing and active customer collaboration make a reasonable contribution into effective risk management of a project.
1. AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT COACHING
An Agile coach does very similar things to what an organizational coach does. However the scope of work may vary a lot. Some projects mostly need a meeting organizer, but some can involve even coding. The core competency of an agile coach is:
- Agile-lean practicing
- Professional coaching
- Facilitating
- Mentoring
- Teaching
- Organizational development
- Business development
- Technical expertise
This is also about why agile coaching, processes and ceremonies as a part of agile methodology are still effective to use not only in software development projects.
2. AGILE IN BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
The essence of Agile Business Development comes from adopting Agile Manifesto principles in business processes administration and development instruments. Naturally a child of IT-industry experts is expanding its teaching via IT tools for businesses. Almost a half of project managers use Agile Software for non IT projects! This lets include into managements such Agile things like:
- Workflow tracking
- Analytics and story tracking
- Activity streams and boards
In terms of organization, the aforementioned optimization can move to Agile because of needs to be more fast and innovative. But an Agile coach as well as an organizational coach comes, when a company dares to optimize itselfs deep enough. Innovation will start within the team agility and self-organization, but will have to change the management leadership styles as well as the company structure, policies and corporate culture.
3. AGILE IN MARKETING
Agile management of a marketing team has absorbed the most of agile coaching methodology and its principles. First of all, marketers do loads of completely different stuff. From very tactical, like posting and social listening to ongoing marketing strategy innovations. So the pace and the responsibility of the marketing team need to be an each of its member’s initiative in order to have the company results along with its employees satisfaction rather than burn out. This the is main reason of team productivity and self-organization for a successful sprint.
Each of three well known Agile Stand-up questions are as important as the Sprint planning session and both Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective meetings. User stories, epics and themes let optimize core algorithms of inbound marketing contacts behaviour. A closer look at Agile Marketing will force to a accept defined cases of its interpretation, but not the common rules and terms of it. Most CMO (Chief Marketing Officers) have differences in the aforementioned categories being unfamiliar with Agile Methodology. However, they already understand it strategic advantages and work on its implementation.
A summary of why business choose Agile is about the following:
- Quick move to the market
- Being responsive and flexible
- Increase in productivity
- Keeping the direction of the most impact actions
- Staying user friendly and customer-centric