Being Agile is much more than simply applying new management and development techniques. It is a state of mind associated with a set of practices that involve all of a company’s departments.
4 reasons to be Agile:
-
Increase productivity and reduce time-to-market
For our clients, quick release times provide a huge advantage over competitors. The Scrum methodology eases the qualification and estimation process, allows team members to compare their performance to the average team productivity rate and allows for less documentation and formalization.
-
Quickly change features to follow market shifts
Do not let competitors release a higher quality product before you! The sequential composition of sprints eases the modification or addition of a feature which was not initially planned. This flexibility allows you to quickly react to an ever-changing market.
-
Fill your employees with enthusiasm
Working on different projects and being involved in each new feature boosts motivation. Every team member is expected to express his opinions and can contribute to the project decision-making process. Also, enjoying the satisfaction of continuous deliveries takes away the boredom of old methods based on one delivery per year!
-
Energize your clients
Delivering something new after each sprint avoids the “tunnel effect” and keeps our clients excited about their product. They remain involved in the development by participating in daily meetings, just like any member of the project team.
Agile methods are based on 3 main principles:
-
Increase visibility of the team’s work
The Kanban methodology suggests the use of a task board in order to visualize the team’s workflow. A task board can be visualized in the form of card walls, post-it notes, dashboards, or even columns containing workflow steps.
-
Limit Work-In-Progress (WIP)
WIP is a Kanban core concept that refers to finding the right equilibrium between the team’s capacity and the client’s demand.
-
Optimize lead time
The next step after setting WIP limits is to measure the average time necessary to take one item through all the board stages in order to increase predictability, commit to SLAs and meet the release plan.
Collaborating with agile suppliers helps companies become more agile themselves and thus more easily achieve business innovations with tight budgets.
For many years, Pentalog has implemented an internal agile program to completely align all its departments’ processes to efficient business practices which ensures high-performance for Pentalog and its clients.
