Why are organizations adopting Agile? Simple – To make more Money!
Deepak Sharma
Building India Accelerator & IA Labs | Serial Entrepreneur | Angel Investor | Coach | Polymath | Aspiring Yogi
Bamboozled? Don’t get baffled at the ‘simple’ answer revealed in headline. As Confucius stated, “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated”. Exchange ‘Life’ with ‘Agile’ and read my blog below to unearth why I stated this.
I have taken numerous agile workshops in the past and the 1st question that I pose to my participants is this – “Why are more and more companies moving towards agile?” More often than not I get the following responses from my enthusiastic participants:-
Cannot agree more to this which is also corroborated by the Version One – 10th Annual State of Agile Report
However, in my view all of the above are manifestations of agile transformation but not the ‘sweet spot’ from a CEO perspective.
Let’s take a step back and understand why do organizations exist? Apply Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and understand the ‘Physiological’ needs of an organization.
As air, water and food are the metabolic requirements of survival for human beings similarly an organization require cash flow, improved top line / bottom line for survival. Having had the first-hand experience of running a start-up, I cannot but only vouch to the hilt that cash flow is the lifeline of an organization. You must be wondering, “Agreed but how does it relate to Agile, pls?”
Let’s understand and make a very simple?attempt to define and understand Agile.
?‘Doing Right Things, Right with Speed.
Doing Right Things
Product Owner closely works with the business and collaborates with the Scrum team to define the product charter, user personas and story map to lay down the product roadmap & vision which helps build awesome products for their customers helping them solve their real life problems.
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Do Things Right
This is all about execution where the teams use good practices of scrum ceremonies - sprint planning, backlog grooming, daily stand-up, sprint review and retrospective?and engineering practices - test driven development, agile testing pyramid, pair programming to build products with ‘Quality In’ approach.
?Speed
As projects are getting more complex, speed factor is getting?important for organizations. Practices like continuous integration, continuous deployment, test automation, devops, infrastructure as a code?can drastically?improve on the cycle / lead time for delivery of products which can help deliver features to the customer much ahead of the competition achieving T2M.
If an organization operates in the top right hand quadrant, company is slated for enduring success. How? If customer NPS scores are high, companies will not only be able to?retain existing customers but also acquire new customers.?Close collaboration between customers, development, operations ensures that employees are motivated and feel pride in the products which are built. This will lead to employee retention and high NPS on the employee front. Improved NPS score on both customer & employee front, will eventually lead to improved top line and bottom line for the organization.
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“Money is not the most important thing in the world. Love Is. Fortunately, I love money.
Did I hear this from an Agilist? :) Keep improving & Stay Agile!
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Author is a Lean & Agile Coach, Transformation Consultant and co-founder of Organiq which is an IT consulting company specializing in Agile, Devops, TOGAF and ITIL and wholly owned subsidiary of AppWorks