The Agile Redemption

The landscape of business in the 21^st Century is being shaped by the resurgence of the small firm. Be it a bakery, a niche restaurant serving exotic cuisine, a small mobile phone app maker or a startup offering web-development services – the importance of the ‘small business’ is being sharpened in today’s economic landscape. A coherent analogy would be the McKinsey view of the modern economy shaped as a barbell – few large firms on one side, the mid-sized firms populate the middle and thousands of small firms balance the other side. The growing importance of small firms on one side seemingly balances the few large firms on the other side. But how is all this happening?

A number of factors contribute to the answer to this question. But the focus here is on the ‘agility’ of the small firms, the technology and how that is an enabler. The best example of how technology is enabling small businesses capture significant mind shares and market shares is the power of software and the ‘agility’ it attributes to businesses. From providing analytics to building a better customer relationship through web services, software is paving the way for small companies itching to serve the market they target. However, one would be missing the wood for the trees if one fails to realize how critical the methodologies are to developing a piece of well-functioning, targeted and customized software. And when one talks of methodologies in the 21^st century, one most definitely hits upon the term Agile.

Agile & Small Businesses

Small businesses run on tight purse strings. Things are piecemeal and nothing is done without keeping an eye on the results it should deliver. Hence the ‘IT” part of businesses or small software development firms take on a huge responsibility when saddled with some initiative like developing a creative piece of software that captures X amounts of data/insights and delivers Y dollars worth of results. The fuzziness of requirements coupled with the fog over the end result is what Agile flourishes in and delivers results that not only work but deliver excellence.

Agile & the Development process

Although there are several different flavors of an Agile methodology, the fundamental facets remain indelible and unwavering. The principal objectives of Agile are – shorter delivery lifecycle, smaller teams, continued customer collaboration and iterative development. To break down the aforementioned into simpler steps – Close and repeated Collaboration with customer to understand business needs => Cross-functional teams break work into smaller pieces of functionality => Work executed in priority order => Delivery of working software in short frequent durations => Iterative development, testing and deployment =>All stakeholders work together to communicate what is valuable for business, when it will be delivered, and enforce ongoing commitment. What this does is offer managers strategic and operational benefits such as lower costs, lower defect rates, flexibility to change, and the ability to leverage new technical or business information for rapidly changing/dynamic business needs with a need for fast time-to-market or delivery. In other words, working through the fuzziness of requirements and the fog of results just became interesting and fun!

Agile & the statistics

A recent survey by the hallowed Harvard Business School revealed – using Agile delivered 50% reduction in engineering efforts, 55% improvement in time to market and 925% improvement in the number of changes allowed during the development process. The same study stated a 50% improvement in quality associated with iterative development. No wonder case studies of Agile include that of a small die-cutting shop in Ohio, a mid-sized law firm in Washington or a small chain of sports goods stores – all with similar requirements. They all wanted to harness the power of software, customized to their own business needs and they all wanted it done within a definite budget and timeframe. Agile is what they embraced. And excellence is what they experienced. 

[Written for Recruiterbox, 2012]

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