- Agile is a widely talked about way of working these days.
For those of you not familiar with Agile,
I'll give you a very short explanation.
In a nutshell, Agile is a style of project management
that emphasizes working in short bursts, or sprints,
that allow for constant reassessment and adaptation.
Agile is a great way of doing development
because it focuses on completing work
in a rapid and iterative fashion.
The Agile Manifesto is a formal statement
of how Agile values some behaviors more highly than others.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Working software over comprehensive documentation.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
And responding to change over following a plan.
Now, by the way, I have to say this,
it doesn't not value things like documentation
or planning, those still have to happen.
It's just that the other things are more important.
Collaboration and working in Agile
were made for each other, the Agile principles
more or less require collaborative practices to succeed.
First of all, there's an absolute need
for the development team to be
collaborating with and talking to the customer,
the one for whom the product is being made,
be it software or process or widgets or whatever.
If there isn't active communication between the two parties,
there's opportunity for misalignment.
If the team knows exactly what the customer's
requirements are, they can focus on meeting those.
And collaboration and communication
within the Agile team is also huge.
Collaborative tools allow the team to share
planning, progress, and demo completed work.
One of the more popular frameworks
for Agile is known as Scrum.
Scrum calls for very regular, sometimes daily,
short meetings of the team to update on progress
and surface any blockers.
Ideally, these are held in person,
but the reality is that we don't all
necessarily work in the same place.
Collaborative technologies like screen sharing
and video conferencing make these meetings
much more doable and productive.
There are also software tools for working in Agile,
and, yes, many of them contain collaborative features
like those we've already talked about:
co-editing, chat streams, comments, et cetera, et cetera.
There is no way that Agile can
possibly succeed in an organization
that does not have a collaborative mindset.
If you'd like to learn some more about Agile,
there are some great courses available to you.
Check out Agile Project Management Foundations,
and Scrum: The Basics for additional information.