Agile in < 100 words ; < 60 seconds

I recently got an opportunity to meet one of our prospective customer in the BPO segment who had heard of Agile and wanted to understand a bit more in detail and then potentially look at applying those concepts in his organization.

Here is how the conversation started, "Gentleman, We are a non-IT  organization and doing good as far as our processes & practices are concerned. I have heard of Agile and don't think it is useful for us. I know it is for IT delivery organizations therefore, can you explain Agile in < 100 words and in < 60 seconds on what it is and how can it be useful for us. If I am convinced we will talk further, Deal?"

I had no other option to say, "Deal" and put my thinking caps on to figure out how to explain Agile in a simplistic fashion which a layman can understand.

Here is how I started and the counting begins :)

Agile is a philosophy - a set of values and principles, where you split your organization into small, cross functional, self organized teams

Split your work into small concrete deliverables sorted by priority

Split time into short fixed length iterations with potentially shippable deliverables after each iteration

So instead of a large group spending a lot of time building a big thing, we have a small team spending short time delivering a small thing but integrating regularly to see the whole

This results in building awesome products at speed to market which your customer love and solve their real life problems.

Phew...I was not counting but I thought it was < 100 words in < 60 seconds..is what was going in my mind. I asked," What do you think, does this make sense to you?".

"Yes", came the reply and we sat together for the next 2 hours talking about the specific problem statement at hand and its solution/options.

"Life is really simple and we insist on making it complicated. Unclutter the Clutter", What do you think?

Keep Improving and Stay Agile !

Author is a Lean, Agile coach, Transformation Consultant & Co-Founder of AppWorks.

Organiq is an IT consulting company specializing in Agile, Devops, ITSM, Enterprise Architecture and IT Governance and a wholly owned subsidiary of Appworks.