Agile Programming

Even if the economy has looked a little up in the New Year, the threat of a recession is still weighing very heavily on everyone’s minds—especially business owners. Of course, what everyone wants to know is how they can weather the global economic crisis without losing market share or watching profits take a nosedive. More and more, I’m seeing business leaders and analysts point to project management frameworks such as lean, agile, and Scrum as the answer. And while the reality of changing the way your company works could create some short-term challenges, agile management practices can yield incredible savings and results over time.

In a recent post titled “Mastering the Recession with Lean, Agile, and Scrum” on www.agilesoftwaredevelopment.com, blogger Peter Stevens considers how agile methods can steer organizations toward lean operations that can both withstand hard times and flourish when the recession loosens its grip. The first piece of indispensible advice is “create value for your clients.” In fact, this should be the shining beacon that illuminates every one of an organization’s activities. If you’re focused on building something so peerlessly useful, created with your customer’s needs in mind, then your customer won’t be able to deny its value. And in that situation, they won’t be able to afford not to retain your services or use your use your product.

The second pearl of wisdom is to “eliminate waste.” This concept is more closely linked to lean manufacturing than to either Scrum or general agile, but, really, it’s like dealing with two sides of the same coin. The benefits of eliminating waste are twofold. In the midst of the recession, it helps organizations to focus its business on those activities that create the most business value, even forcing management to acknowledge branches of the business that are not bearing fruit. This process of organizational streamlining pays off over time, too. If a company reconfigures itself to survive during challenging times, imagine how that same configuration will operate when customers aren’t guarding their coffers as closely. Suddenly, a team guided by its attention to its customers’ needs that effectively reduces waste is prepared to succeed in both good times and bad.