6 Common Benefits of Agile

Every business today is striving to deliver value to the market more quickly, deepen relationships with customers, improve employee engagement, and cope with the ever-increasing pace of innovation. Many people still question whether Agile methodologies are suitable for the largest enterprises and complex technical solutions. The collaborative, iterative and user-focused approach to developing software is often seen as something for smaller teams and organizations. But this is proving to be false. Many organizations are not only proving that agile can scale in large enterprises, but they are quickly realizing the full benefits. In this blog, we will look at six of the most frequently reported benefits of adopting agile in large enterprises.

1. Faster time to market – If you don’t reach the market early enough, you cannot convince your customers to buy your product just because you built it using ultra-sophisticated processes. Agile encourages you to build a “Minimum viable product” or MVP for faster market delivery. And it has been very successful with 73% of the Agile adopters proclaiming that agile reduced their time-to-market significantly.

2. Early ROI – It is possible for products made though agile to reach the market faster than those made through traditional methods. Research shows that there is a 37% chance of products developed using agile reaching the market faster than using traditional software development methods. In a competitive environment, it is essential to get the products to the market faster than the competition. Agile leads to better productivity as well as early ROI.

3. Feedback from real customers – A significant dilemma of the software companies following traditional processes is that they never know before the completion of the project that they have built the “right” product. The customer is the only one that can tell you if you’ve built the right product, and the traditional 6 to 12-month delivery cycles simply don’t allow for the early feedback cycles. Agile adoption allows organizations to build smaller increments of value, which ensures customer feedback is received early and often.

4. Early risk reduction – Agile doesn’t treat risk as a separate area to be managed – agile is risk management. By delivering early and getting feedback quickly, we reduce the risk of building the wrong product. By focusing on building the highest priority and highest value features in the early sprints, we reduce the risk that we won’t have a solution that can deliver on time. By continuously integrating and building defect free software, we reduce the risk that our product wasn’t built right just before we need to bring it to market.

5. Better quality – With the traditional fixed time, fixed cost, and fixed scope approach, the only thing left for organizations to manage is quality. Agile allows for fixed time and cost, but it negotiates scope and doesn’t negotiate on quality. An agile team may not build everything you hoped for, but you can trust that the highest priority features will be built with highest degree of quality possible.

6. Culture and morale – Many organizations start out to adopt agile with no expectation or thought about the potential improvements to culture and morale. Agile holds the promise of creating teams of empowered individuals, and teams full of people working on the highest priorities of the business with a shared sense of purpose. When agile is done well, and leadership is fully engaged and onboard, it creates really fun places to work. There is nothing quite like being part of a team of people working hard toward common goals.

THAT’S A WRAP!

Statistics say that by using agile methods and practices, on average, the time to market is 37% faster and the efficiency of your team is increased by 46%. I hope you enjoyed reading about the benefits of agile and there are obviously others. If you’re ready to start realizing the benefits, drop us a line – we would love to hear goals and discuss how we can help!