Agile Programming

As I read Ty Kiisel’s recent post on Projects@Work, (http://www.projectsatwork.com/article.cfm?ID=246384) I couldn’t help but notice that the strategies he endorsed to help companies do more with less are many of the same strategies that agile uses to help teams become more efficient. Kiisel writes, “Continuous improvement in any market is the life-blood of a successful organization—improving processes and increasing efficiencies are even more important if the economy heads south.” Of course, he’s right. But reading that, I immediately thought of how agile methods, such as Scrum, literally build innovation into their processes. Because agile methods approach work incrementally (in chunks) and iteratively (in regular cycles, known as sprints), teams have the opportunity to build products that their customers want while improving processes. Let me explain. After each sprint has concluded (sprints are typically between two- and four-weeks in length, but always the same length), the team gets together for the Retrospective Meeting, where everyone assesses their performance in the previous sprint. What went well? What went poorly? What improvements could be made for next time? This meeting provides the team with the chance to focus on how they’re working together, not the final product. Dedicating time for this ongoing process of self-evaluation means that the team is always striving for improvement, refining how it works to become more and more efficient. And while this process is typically relegated to the team level, there’s no reason management couldn’t implement the Retrospective Meeting on an organizational level: to make sure that the company is doing what it can to maximize its resources and reduce waste. That’s the sort of measure that leads to success, whether it’s business as usual or the economy is tanking.