Businesses must continue to adopt Agile to stay nimble and here is how

By Shalini A. Nair, Associate Vice President, Corporate Initiatives, Quality, Infosys

As enterprises strive to stay ahead in their digital journeys, with the constant threat of disruptions from digital natives, increasing consumer expectations and the rapid advancement of technology, their ability to adapt quickly is heavily dependent on their ways of working. Successful organisations have navigated their journeys on a solid Agile-DevOps foundation.

Agile is a revolutionary approach to speed up software development and has stood the test of time. In a rapidly evolving technology landscape, a long wait time for software release is a surefire way to lose clients and business. 

Agile philosophy uses an incremental approach to software development with increased stress on flexibility, collaboration, resiliency, and customer satisfaction. It has spawned many methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming with each approach speeding-up software development differently. More recently, we’ve had Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Spotify-based scaling, LESS and other scaling frameworks, designed to enable large software projects to be Agile. DevOps practices, tools and culture bring down the barriers between development and operations, with focus on increasing automation. Agile in conjunction with DevOps has become immensely relevant for large, medium, and small enterprises to be nimble as they traverse their digital transformation journeys.

Many organisations that have successfully adopted Agile-DevOps at scale have seen a significant improvement in their engineering outcomes. For instance, in 2016, a leading global bank that used DevOps to rework its IT operations noticed an uptick in its software release cycle by 40% and a 70% reduction in testing efforts. 

A product-led and platform-driven approach to work is gaining prominence with Agile and DevOps serving as foundations. This brings in a holistic approach to elevating the enterprise focus from engineering outcomes to business value.

Pitfalls of falling behind on Agile

Ignoring Agile comes with its own set of disadvantages. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) was found to not be following Agile software acquisition guidelines across all its weapons programs. This was said to have a direct impact on its ability to respond to evolving threats. The DoD has since changed its approach to double down on Agile methodologies for speedy development and deployment of software to tackle threats. 

Agile can bring great success when done right

While adoption of Agile ways of working pr can be approached through various pathways, here are some insights on how it can be used to sustain success.

Holistic Agile mindset: Implementing Agile in silos can drastically reduce an organisation’s ability to bring in agility and efficacy. Agile practices, tools, and principles should be applied across the entire software engineering and operations lifecycle to ensure opportunities for better business outcomes. Beyond the technical and IT departments, functions such as product sales, marketing, finance, operation, and human resources should adopt agile principles and practices and work in sync to bring in business agility consistently across the enterprise. A leading telecom player in New Zealand adopted Agile in a way that 40% of its employees were moved into a cross-functional team comprising IT, networks, product marketing, and digital verticals. This helped the fledgling telco-only company to transform into a digital services provider. 

Rethinking how to measure value realised: Agile emphasises performance indicators such as velocity, productivity, quality, and throughput, that need to be enhanced. In addition, impact on business – customer conversion, growth, user feedback, product returns, cost of sales – must be monitored and measured. As product-led operating models take shape, the concept of objective and key results (OKRs) to track the flow of value becomes the next evolution in the agile governance.  

Sustained Enablement: As an organisation gets larger, the Agile skills start to get patchy because only a small cohort of specialists know them, or these skills are shared in an ad-hoc manner. This isn’t sustainable and organisations must invest in thorough, ongoing business-wide training programs, hands-on learning, with investments in coaching to bring everyone on the same page. 

Being ready to constantly adapt: Agile is a software development philosophy that has been evolving as software engineering evolves – Scrum, Kanban, XP, Scaling frameworks, DevOps and now the advent of AI have all become entwined as enterprises transform their ways of working.  Focusing too much on process adherence and not the outcome can be detrimental. Organisations may evolve their Agile practices and new needs may emerge. Having an adapting and evolving mindset is key to Agile success. 

Data transparency and culture to reward accountability: Organisations must share data in an accessible way with the teams to keep them in the loop regarding business outcomes. Failures from experiments should not be a taboo. There has to be a cultural shift to bring in guardrails to encourage experimentation, take failure in stride and reward accountability for mistakes.

For instance, a well-known truck manufacturer used the Scrum method to shorten a five-year development cycle to just 18 months by ensuring 100% availability of team members and complete transparency and communications across departments.   

Works across small, medium, and large enterprises: Looking at the operating principles and the focus on speed may make one think that Agile is best suited only for small or medium enterprises. A hybrid scaling framework adapted to the enterprise’s needs can help scale this in very large organisations too, bringing in a culture of agility and innovation.  For example, a large enterprise such as Amazon, which has global operations with hundreds of thousands of employees, has also successfully deployed Agile methodologies at scale. In each of its multiple product lines, Amazon uses hybrid teams comprising web developers, product owners, merchandising specialists, and more. They are given enough freedom to pursue certain business outcomes once the planning documents are approved. 

Still relevant

Agile methodology was introduced in the early 2000s, but its guiding principles are even more relevant in this rapidly changing business and technology landscape. Over the years, adopting various agile approaches, such as Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, Scaling frameworks, and more recently in conjunction with DevOps have demonstrated significantly better outcomes, if used mindfully, consistently and with clear goals. Organisations that invest in Agile-DevOps foundation can quickly evolve their ways of working in real time to adapt to the rapid pace of change in technology and markets to be ready for the AI-led digital future.