Converting from waterfall to agile is a journey. Like all journeys, it’s best to have a route avoiding road construction. Our Fortune 2000 customers realize agile doesn’t have Google Maps. As a result, they’ve turned to our agile experts with 1,000,000+ hours of Agile customer experiences to provide the roadmap. In this blog post, we will discuss our experiences, conclusions and recommendations for an agile transformation journey.
Agile has become the preferred method of software development for the following reasons:
- Agile is transparent meaning clients can become highly involved throughout the project
- Agile offers early and predictable delivery, meaning new features are delivered quickly and frequently giving organizations the opportunity to release software earlier than planned.
- Agile allows for easier change, so organizations have the option to constantly refine and reprioritize the overall product backlog.
- Agile improves quality. By breaking down the project in manageable components, the project team can achieve high quality development
But, the journey to Agile has some conditions. The deployment of digital transformation requires people. For the foreseeable future (the next five years) corporate IT will be required to augment its staff with third-party resources like onsite contractors, offshore support, or U.S. onshore consultants as IT will either not be able to recruit the necessary people due to a resource shortage in its geographic location, or not want to hire people as it does not want the fixed cost associated with a specific technology. In either circumstance, an agile journey will include the integration of at least one third party.
In conclusion, digital transformation is the destination, Agile’s speed-to-market and accuracy is the road, and your employed staff with third-party resources is the vehicle to get there. Stay tuned for our upcoming blog post, “Adapting Agile for the Enterprise,” for a look at the flipside: Agile’s underlying weaknesses.