Agile; not just ways of working

Agile Delivery

How do we define agile ways of working? At core they’re a customer-centric approach to conceiving, creating, and releasing a flow of products and services to customers. To achieve true business agility, organisations need to rapidly increase their ability to deliver these valuable products and services.?

Looking at how software is delivered, and how factors such as a better approach to gathering business requirements, and the use of automated pipelines and scalable cloud, can all significantly improve delivery speed, product quality, and the ability to pivot business models in response to change.

Agile Product Delivery

There are three areas key to agile product delivery.

• Customer centricity and design thinking:?This puts the customer as the focus of every business decision, and employs design thinking to ensure the solution is providing true value, that it’s feasible, viable, sustainable, and above all, what the customer wants.?
• Developing on cadence and releasing on demand. Developing according to cadence helps manage variability, whilst releasing on demand helps ensure customers get the right solution at the right time.??
• DevOps and a continuous delivery pipeline. Together these make up the foundation that lets organisations provide value ‘on tap’ to meet customer and/or market demand.

The continual cycle in agile of ‘design, test, deploy’ delivers subsets of valuable features, and helps organisations get products to market fast.

This is one of the main benefits agile delivery benefits businesses – improving both efficiency and bottom line. Other benefits include more control over workflow, higher productivity levels, and overall higher quality, customer satisfaction, and ROI.

Automation and Scalable Cloud

An effective pipeline is a key factor of agile project delivery, and here agile overlaps nicely with?CI/CD (continuous integration, continuous delivery) and DevOps, expecting?developers to?make incremental updates to their service or product.

The aim of automating CI/CD pipelines is to speed up delivery without compromising on quality.?

Although it’s possible to manually execute the steps of a CI/CD pipeline, their true value and benefits are released via automation.?

Cloud scalability (the ability to increase or decrease IT resources as required) is another technology that combines well with agile methodology.?

The main advantages of cloud scalability are:??

• It enables and supports a better user experience.???
• It’s an effective time and cost-saving solution.
• It speeds up time to market, and increases flexibility and adaptability.??
• It allows for disaster recovery.

Agile teams are turning to cloud computing because of its potential to reduce the cost of product development. Essentially, it provides a scalable infrastructure on a pay-per-use basis.

By combining agile and scalable cloud, development can deliver the most valuable product possible to end users, and make swift changes based on feedback on demand.

Want to chat about the best agile ways of working for your own organisation? At XP2, we have a range of expertise across the agile delivery and software engineering landscape.?Get in touch!