Why Is Agile Benefits Your Business?

But what if it is not just a tendency? Plenty of studies conducted worldwide show that the Agile way of managing projects is far more successful than traditional project management, leading to faster time-to-market, first-mover advantage, a superior quality product, and increased customer satisfaction. 

There are many reasons why the Agile development process and project management are right for your business. First, Agile is NOT a methodology; it is a mindset. It is a set of values and principles that can help you gain many advantages in your market.

The Agile Manifesto contains four fundamental values:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

• Working software over comprehensive documentation.

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

• Responding to change over following a plan.

Of course, if you make those values and principles a part of your business journey. You will ask how? Let’s dive into the topic together.

Why use Agile Software Development?

1. Reduce Risks

Agile declares frequent software delivery, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference for a shorter timescale. Let's try to translate it into the business language. Imagine you have an idea for a product that will change the world. You are delighted by the future vision and decide to spend all your savings to introduce it to the market. You're hiring a software development team, and they start working. One year passed, and you spent all your money and did not gain new. Finally, you and your project team are ready to deliver your product to the actual customer, who is really meant to use it. And... it appears that it is not exactly what they need. Of course, the idea is viable, but only if you change the implementation a bit here and there. The benefits of the Agile approach allow us to gain this information before, you know, spending a year and a considerable amount of money. How? - By early delivery and fast feedback from a real customer, not a project manager. 

The iterative approach of the Agile development process enables quick feedback and constant adaptation to changing circumstances. This flexibility of iterative development is intended to help companies and self-organizing teams respond better to ever-changing business needs and streamline the decision-making process. By contrast, traditional methodologies often leave little room for change once a project plan is in place. This is a radical change from conventional modes of the development cycle, which emphasize planning and predicting at the beginning of a project and delivery near the end.

2. Maximize the Amount of Work Not Done

When working with an Agile framework, you should remember that the goal is not to make yourself busy. Or to load all the developers with the work. The end goal is not to do work just for the sake of doing work. Instead, the goal is to reduce waste, bring value, and ensure end-user experience and higher customer satisfaction. So, if you don't have valuable tasks to do right - ask the team, bring in some hypotheses to test, give yourself a few hours of rest - enhance creativity, focus on decreasing the feedback loop, and listen to your customer needs. You may be surprised by the outcomes!

3. Reduce Costs of the Entire Process

I will refer to the article's first example: create an MVP (minimum viable product), get early customer feedback, and you will not need to develop functionality nobody will ever use. Agile makes project predictability better and improves the final product before it hits the market. In addition, launching an MVP can help you generate some buzz and interest in your product before it goes live. Finally, you can save on software development costs by only creating a few features. Worldwide statistics show that 65% of development work never goes to production. 65%, can you imagine? And it's only your choice how much real value you and your business will bring to the world. So if you're looking to reduce costs, improve quality control features and increase your chances of success, creating an MVP should be at the top of your list.

4. Diversity Increase Creativity

If you read Agile Manifesto attentively, you'll see that there is not just one statement about the team. It seems that the Agile team is in each of them! It does not mean we care about the people that much, so we forget about business needs. Instead, we use each team member's opinion and experience-both from a business and technical perspective. As our team members come from various backgrounds, each brings their unique skills and perspective to the table. By combining different viewpoints, we can get a well-rounded view of any situation. For example, the team member might also be an actual customer of the product they develop. One of the developers might bring the idea of a feature that will make your product the top one in its niche. Agile practices enhance opinion exchange and allow listening to each other. Try it!

Summing Up the Benefits of Agile Methods or Agile Project Management

Agile project management will help you be more responsive to change and collaborate with your team members better than ever before in order to achieve success as an organization - not just one person doing all of this work on their own (or even worse: behind someone else's back), make sure that everything runs smoothly because everyone involved knows how important teamwork really should always stay when working towards something bigger than ourselves… And last but definitely not least, the Agile method in software engineering is based on continuous delivery and continuous improvement. This means that your business will always be getting better and better, which will help you to maintain a competitive advantage. 

So if you're looking for a better way to do business, don't be afraid to be Agile - use flexibility and creativity to anticipate future trends and needs and bring more value to your customers! And that will definitely reflect on your business!