Your Team Is Agile! What about Your Business Model?
Since agile’s adoption into the software development industry, much focus has been directed toward looking closely at improving the processes and productivity of development teams, but couldn’t those same improvements be implemented company-wide?
Rob Myers, an agile coach at the Agile Institute, sat down with Ade Shokoya at the Agile Development Conference West to discuss the growing concerns of companies who’ve “started to address certain issues that they were seeing on the teams, but now they need to be looking at the broader picture.”
In the video, Myers mentions recently learning more about the lean startup movement, a way of thinking, coined by Eric Ries, that has quickly gained popularity in the last year. One of agile’s core beliefs is taking an iterative approach to software development, and the lean startup movement greatly expands this process. Myers describes the movement as one where:
…organizations take an iterative approach to their business model. So they’re actually iterating over their very business model and addressing certain issues that come up and trying to find new and innovative ways of addressing those.
To imagine a business model, traditionally set up so early in the process of building a company, as something that could be built iteratively along with everything else a company does is a radical concept, but one that instantly makes its advantages known.
The entire concept of agile revolves around working directly with, and learning from, your customers in order to deliver the greatest product imaginable. With agile’s benefits being so widely documented, it’s not hard to imagine how joining the lean startup movement and expanding agile’s reach would result in additional success, and not just in software development.
Rob Myers describes his involvement in helping create “organizational transformations” which help eliminate hindrances caused by the theory of constraints, where it's believed that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The lean startup movement is a strong tool for addressing these weak links as they may very well exist outside of a development team and may not be a person at all.
Your company’s weakest link could very well be found in your entire business model, especially if it was built on the assumption of what your customers need, long before you and your team ever asked them.
