What is Agile?

Agile movement started by visionaries of Software development. With time, it has evolved beyond the IT and engineering departments. Agile is now organization-wide. Business Agility is not something new. So, what is Agile in today’s context?

Agile is a cultural movement which emphasizes on

• numerous small feedback loops involving all levels of organizational hierarchy as well as customers/consumers;
• continuous learning;
• evolution of business;
• technical and inter-personnel practices;
• exposing pain points early to mitigate them early;
• focus on the outcome by working toward continuously increasing effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity at sustainable pace and be predictable with resilience;
• evolving policies and practices; and
• early involvement of stakeholders

to ensure continuous delivery of business value in a sustainable manner.

The very definition of Agile encourages a fluidic work culture, negates rigidities of any framework/methodology, and endorses the absence of ubiquitous best practices. Agile is very context-specific.

A hierarchical organizational structure increasingly acquires rigidity with the scale which poses challenges to be Agile at the core. Also, the environment in which an organization operates demands a high level of predictability which is very much against continuous evolution.

A successful organization keeps a balance between rigidities arising due to hierarchy, demands of predictability, and continuous evolution which has no end state. To maintain this delicate balance an organization should adopt contextualized, compose-able, and bite-size Agile inspired methods and practices. It must be ingrained in organizational mindshare.