I’ve been applying Agile practices and following Agile principles ever since I learnt about it. I’m going to explain what ways Agile helps me with my daily challenges. All Agile principles and ideas were included in the document called Agile Manifesto, You can read it here. So what are the advantages of Agile?
➡️I put people first.
Agile is using the collaborative intelligence of people. It’s not about knowing everything. Nobody knows everything. Agile takes advantage of cross-functional teams in which people learn from one another.
➡️Success is a team sport. I learnt to empower people.
Empowering people involves asking them powerful questions instead of giving answers to the problem. Moreover, it also requires providing people with tools they need, and fostering the proper conditions they could improve in as a team.
➡️I don’t do things that I find pointless at a given moment.
Agile does not tell to do things that bring you or others no value. It’s a philosophy based on common sense. More focus is put on goals rather than a means to reach them.
➡️I put greater stress on outcome than output.
Here I presented the differences between these two concepts. Simply speaking, output is the tangible effect of your effort, a product. Outcome relates to how this product influences its users and how it changes their world.
➡️I’m more comfortable with change.
That is because I take failure as lessons. I take them as something positive.
➡️I could better better deal with risk
I break my work down so that I could better deal with risk, and therefore I reduce the size of the area I will have to discover at a time.
➡️My main focus is put on what is valuable to the product user.
No matter how great my product is, it’s useless unless there are people wanting to use it. People use products to solve THEIR problems and to satisfy THEIR needs.
➡️It’s perfectly fine to make a mistake.
➡️ I’m OK with failure. We learn best by doing. I inspect what I have done and adapt further solutions.
➡️I’m customer-oriented.
It’s much easier to discover a product when the customer and the maker are on the same page.
➡️I’m keen on experimentation
With experiments we can discover what we don’t know that we don’t know: the unknown unknowns. The purpose of the experiment is provide you with knowledge you need. In a complex domain of work, experiments are the best practices one can use to learn more about the product.
➡️MVP concept
An MVP stands for “minimum viable product”. To me it’s any done work that can be used by the customer. It might be just a piece of work that is done, working and providing some business value. In Agile we deliver it often and early.
➡️Done means valuable
My work is Done, as I try to avoid multitasking. Done means a working potentially usable product.
Curiosity instead of control
I’m curious about NEW solutions. If you keep doing something exactly the same way, that’s not Agile. Agile is a continuous improvement.
