Agile outside Software: How All Teams Can Benefit
Sure, agile has always been meant to benefit and speed up software teams so that projects can be better tested and more quickly released. But just because agile was born with software in mind doesn’t mean its core principles can’t work outside of this specific context.
Better collaboration, adaptive planning, early delivery, and constant improvement—do any of these agile pillars sound like something a non-software team would want to avoid? Agile has its place in different companies and teams across a multitude of industries, and that’s why CNBC’s Michael Gregoire argues that we need to become an agile society.
Gregoire claims that we’re approaching the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which customization will be paramount and our vast array of software will link the Internet of Things with “Industry 4.0.” By adopting an agile mindset in our government and decision-making bodies, as well as empowering our varied and multi-skilled workforce, we can better prepare for what’s to come.
Dipanjan Munshi wrote on InfoQ that agile might actually work best in non-software projects and organizations, and he lays out a five-point agenda to get started. One of the major themes within this plan is establishing definitions—of “customer,” of “done,” and even of “working software.” By putting non-software situations into software terms, agile has a strong chance of taking hold.
Are there examples out there you can draw from? Absolutely. Although your situation might wildly differ from what’s out there, case studies exist that show how and why agile can help teams that aren’t working in software get better, faster, and stronger. However, it’s always important to think over how you actually plan to use agile, and to understand that even if you have a chance to see a big return, there will be risks along the way that could shake the confidence of your team.
Still, we’re in a new era where customers have certain expectations about the quality of a project, and while you might not be able to update your specific item on the fly in the same way a software team would for a mobile app, an agile mindset can go a long way toward improving its quality.
Jeff Nielsen, 3Pillar’s senior vice president of engineering, told AgileConnection why he thinks agile is the ideal mentality for taking any enterprise to the next level:
In this age of the customer, people aren’t going to put up with bad products. Bad software products can kill you literally in terms of your revenues and your reputation. The reason I think that an agile mindset is not just ideal but necessary is that it’s the only way I know to build great products. You can build adequate, OK, decent products that mostly get the job done with some other mindsets, but the folks that I know that have built these really great software products all have what I would describe as this agile mindset. Enterprises have to figure out how to get more of that.
