Design Thinking and Agile

Design Thinking and Agile are mindset that when practiced, help organizations develop new competencies. We learn to tackle problems and explore possibilities. We strive to make every action a learning opportunity for making better decisions. And, we put learning to work as we pursue outcomes in the way that’s optimized for adapting to constant change. More than following steps, procedures, or instructions, this report describes the mindsets and ways of working that help teams to think differently, practice new skills, and develop new ability.

Design Thinking and Agile are prominent mindsets among teams today. Each mindset brings its own kind of value to the product development life cycle. And although they come from different origins- industrial design, manufacturing, and software development / IT – they share many similarities, and are complementary and compatible with one another.

Design Thinking is a mindset for exploring complex problems for finding opportunity in a world full of uncertainty. It’s a search for meaning, usually focusing on human needs and experience. Using intuitive and abductive reasoning. Design Thinking explores and questions what is, and then imagines what could be with innovative and inventive futuristic solution.

The heart of Agile is building great software / IT service delivery solutions that adapt gracefully to changing needs. Agile begins with a problem- not a requirement – and delivers an elegant solution. The Agile mindset acknowledges that the right solution today might not be the right solution tomorrow. It’s rapid, iterative, easily adapted, and focused on quality through continuous improvement.

Popular opinion suggest that Design Thinking is all about squiggly lines, honeycomb diagrams, overlapping circles, and loop diagrams. Design Thinking is a mindset as well as a toolkit for techniques for applying a designer’s ways of thinking and doing. It is a journey and ways of thinking as much as it is a final outcome. It’s an activity that is inclusive and collaborative. With a little thought, anyone can use the design mindset. This increasingly true in domain not considered the heartland of design, like corporations, governments, health, non-profit organization, and education.

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Agile comes from a need to deliver software project better. Like most movements, the true origins of Agile are debated. Agile is a label came from a collective of 17 independent software practitioners who coalesced in 2001 at a ski resort in snowbird. The meeting resulted in the publication of Agile Manifesto, and formation of Agile Alliance.

Agile Manifesto:

Individuals and interactions over process and tools ?

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contact negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

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This describe the cascading nature of how work happens, Project phases, like analysis, requirements, design, development, testing, and development run in a linear and consecutive sequence, where the preceding phases must be completed before continuing to the next phase. Agile became the umbrella term encompassing alternative approaches emerging through the late 1990s for managing software delivery more appropriately.

The Agile mindset is about achieving outcomes with software or IT delivery in the best way. It’s how IT teams unlock value continuously, adapt to changing needs, and build quality into the software they create.? Design Thinking and Agile are a collaboration in realistic solution. Software is the medium, engineers and designers are the artisans. Together they craft solution that deliver on desired outcomes. And they do their work iteratively, continuously, and paired together. ?The strengths of each mindset come together to help us achieve the right outcomes.

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