AGILE

AGILE provides companies with a guiding framework on how to manage teams throughout organizations, regardless of function, department, industry or product.

AGILE’S purpose:

• Embed a mindset of the way a company’s team works, and how they work with each other
• Entrench an understanding that success or failure depends on leadership
• Break silo thinking and encourage co-creation
• AGILE gives senior management the model, methodology and enabling tools to support business transformation.

Satisfying the customer through early, continuous delivery lies at the heart of AGILE premised on five key pillars:

• Strategy
• Structure
• Process
• People
• Technology

AGILE is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model with cookie-cutter approaches. Instead, four core values guide the AGILE mindset in that it:

• Prioritizes people (individuals and interactions) over processes and tools
• Focuses on working solutions over excessive paper shuffling
• Responds to change rather than following a plan
• Enables customer collaboration over rigid contracts
• “The highest priority,” declares the 2001 AGILE Manifesto, “is to satisfy the customer.”

The hallmarks of an AGILE company include:

• Shorter customer response times with on-time delivery and quick reliable results
• Higher productivity, product quality, reliability and predictability
• Ability to cope with changing environments
• Focuses on “end-to-end” solutions
• Uses current available resources
• Cross-pollination of knowledge
• Reinventing business culture

AGILE provides the catalyst that helps companies reinvent their business culture, which is typically shaped by an organization’s leadership, what they value, what they say and most importantly, what they do.

Many companies believe their focus has to be on ‘doing’ AGILE, when in fact AGILE is something they need strive to be.