#Agile approach to building bridges between business and IT

Admitting you have a problem is often said to be the first big step towards taking action to address it.If the IT delivery team is NOT producing optimum results then it could benefit from adopting a more agile approach to IT delivery, which would encourage greater collaboration between its line of business units and its tranche of techies.

“If a team is fully functional, IT will be empowered to pick up work and connect with someone in the business who can help them prioritize what to work on,”.

From here, they can embark on short cycles of software development, the results of which are shared with the relevant business stakeholders every two weeks. This not only allows them to check on the progress of the project, but provides them with an opportunity to give feedback.

“The business might give us the thumbs up and say they love what they saw, but have a couple of feedback points – or they might say they didn’t like it,”

“The latter shouldn’t really happen because business and development should be interacting during those two weeks so they know what we are going to present to them, which means we shouldn’t be too far off.

“That’s why it’s every two weeks, so if something does go wrong, we only have to throw away or redo two weeks’ work,”.

To ensure the company has something new to showcase at the end of this two-week slog, the organization needs to "automate the testing process" to spring into action as soon as its developers down tools for the day. 

However, if the errors picked up during these overnight testing windows cannot be easily fixed, this helps focus the development team on what problems to address during the next series of sprints.

Developers could be toiling away for months on projects with no oversight from the rest of the business, only to find what they had been working on was wide of the mark, which could have costly repercussions.

However, the organization has to be aware of it pitfalls so as to handle it in a better and a pro active way ........

• Strict delivery management dictates the scope, functionality to be delivered, and adjustments to meet the deadlines.
• Depends heavily on customer interaction, so if customer is not clear, team can be driven in the wrong direction.
• There is very high individual dependency, since there is minimum documentation generated.
• Transfer of technology to new team members may be quite challenging due to lack of documentation.

To conclude : If you want the Agile process to be successful, first need to work and focus on the "DEVELOPERS MINDSET CHANGE " because it’s a mindset change which will ultimately define the "Degree of success".