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New Ways of Working – Drive Business Agility

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New Ways of Working – Drive Business Agility

Business Agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative, digitally enabled business solutions. Everything moves fast in the digital age. Customer desires, competitive threats, technology choices, business expectations, revenue opportunities, and workforce demands now happen at blistering speeds. Today, achieving customer delight at the speed of market changes requires validating innovations with customers and then ensuring that the implementation takes place as soon as possible. Moreover, significant technological advances are unlocking new ways to create this value. For example, AI, Big Data, Cloud, and DevOps enable enterprises to expand their product lines, modernize their existing offerings, scale to mass markets, make fact-based decisions, and streamline solution development.

Every company is embracing Agile as New Ways of Working (NWOW). Agile runs on the principle of “Inspect & Adapt” and focusses on driving value to business by imbibing flexibility into the planning phase and multiple shorter release plans (per Sprint or per a pre-defined number of Sprints). Teams reflect post every Sprint to check if anything can be improved and adjust their strategy for the forthcoming sprint. A few of the commonly use Agile Frameworks are as below:

  • Scrum – the most popularly used Agile framework for software development projects.
  • Kanban – used in individual business departments or for Managed Services, in order to provide the desired visibility over the tasks of the team members.
  • SAFe – used primarily to deliver complex solutions that require more than 50 people.
  • XP – primarily used in projects where the customer requirements change very frequently.
  • FDD – used mainly in long-term, complex software development projects where features are continually added or changed.
  • DSDM – Nowadays primarily widely used in project management in general as it focusses more on the entire project lifecycle.

 

Below is a curated list of best practices that drive Agility today:

  • Shift Left: The principle of Shift Left is to take a task that’s traditionally done at a later stage of the process and perform that task at earlier stages. An example of this is testing. With the traditional Waterfall model, testing is done just before releasing the product into production. This means that serious problems uncovered so late can cause major redesign and long delays. Shift Left Testing addresses this by involving testing teams early in the process. Issues, be it in design or code, can be solved early on before they become major. In fact, shift-left is less about problem detection and more about problem prevention.

  • Prototype Design Thinking:  Creating a physical version of a concept or experiment is a process known as prototyping. A prototype is basically a mockup of the solution that we want to create. Prototyping is a crucial phase in the Design Thinking process. Designers build an almost-working version or mockup of the product, known as a prototype, and test it with potential customers and stakeholders to see whether it truly answers the problems of its consumers. The purpose of creating the design thinking prototype is to check the viability of the existing design and possibly look into what potential customers may have to say about the product. It permits appropriate testing and investigation of design ideas before excessive resources are employed. There are two types – (1) Low – fidelity prototyping (presents the simplest possible structure, visuals, user flows, and layouts) and (2) High – fidelity prototyping (shows almost all of the product’s aspects, including intricate user interfaces and working pages and elements).

  • CI / CD Pipeline: CI/CD is a commonly used acronym in software development. It stands for “continuous integration” and “continuous delivery.” Although these are distinct concepts, they are often treated as though they are one. Continuous Integration is a standard development process where all code in a project is regularly committed to a single branch, whether the development that work is part of is complete or not. Continuous delivery is a regular process that packages up the deployment unit or units that comprise the codebase’s outputs. Automation is ideal for CI and CD practices, since they require the same actions be performed on a regular basis. The automation of CI and CD processes is typically referred to as “pipelines,” an analogy of traditional factory product automation pipelines.  Either a single team can build and maintain the pipeline to production (a purer DevOps model), or the CI/CD pipeline can deliver a stable and more tested set of build artifacts to a separate operations team for deployment. A CI/CD pipeline also facilitates the introduction of other changes that can improve reliability.

Conclusion :

By responding rapidly to changes and adapting their plans accordingly, the Agile delivery teams are able to deliver top-quality products and services in an efficient manner. An agile framework helps in better collaboration, customer focus and iterative development. From a client’s viewpoint, agile software methods are very helpful as they allow for much more flexibility and responsiveness to changes over other traditional models. One of the most striking points about the agile methodology is that they tend to focus on delivering superior value to customers, rather than merely meeting internal timelines.

References

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New Ways of Working – Drive Business Agility

Business Agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative, digitally enabled business solutions. Everything moves fast in the digital age. Customer desires, competitive threats, technology choices, business expectations, revenue opportunities, and workforce demands now happen at blistering speeds. Today, achieving customer delight at the speed of market changes requires validating innovations with customers and then ensuring that the implementation takes place as soon as possible. Moreover, significant technological advances are unlocking new ways to create this value. For example, AI, Big Data, Cloud, and DevOps enable enterprises to expand their product lines, modernize their existing offerings, scale to mass markets, make fact-based decisions, and streamline solution development.

Every company is embracing Agile as New Ways of Working (NWOW). Agile runs on the principle of “Inspect & Adapt” and focusses on driving value to business by imbibing flexibility into the planning phase and multiple shorter release plans (per Sprint or per a pre-defined number of Sprints). Teams reflect post every Sprint to check if anything can be improved and adjust their strategy for the forthcoming sprint. A few of the commonly use Agile Frameworks are as below:

  • Scrum – the most popularly used Agile framework for software development projects.
  • Kanban – used in individual business departments or for Managed Services, in order to provide the desired visibility over the tasks of the team members.
  • SAFe – used primarily to deliver complex solutions that require more than 50 people.
  • XP – primarily used in projects where the customer requirements change very frequently.
  • FDD – used mainly in long-term, complex software development projects where features are continually added or changed.
  • DSDM – Nowadays primarily widely used in project management in general as it focusses more on the entire project lifecycle.

 

Below is a curated list of best practices that drive Agility today:

  • Shift Left: The principle of Shift Left is to take a task that’s traditionally done at a later stage of the process and perform that task at earlier stages. An example of this is testing. With the traditional Waterfall model, testing is done just before releasing the product into production. This means that serious problems uncovered so late can cause major redesign and long delays. Shift Left Testing addresses this by involving testing teams early in the process. Issues, be it in design or code, can be solved early on before they become major. In fact, shift-left is less about problem detection and more about problem prevention.

  • Prototype Design Thinking:  Creating a physical version of a concept or experiment is a process known as prototyping. A prototype is basically a mockup of the solution that we want to create. Prototyping is a crucial phase in the Design Thinking process. Designers build an almost-working version or mockup of the product, known as a prototype, and test it with potential customers and stakeholders to see whether it truly answers the problems of its consumers. The purpose of creating the design thinking prototype is to check the viability of the existing design and possibly look into what potential customers may have to say about the product. It permits appropriate testing and investigation of design ideas before excessive resources are employed. There are two types – (1) Low – fidelity prototyping (presents the simplest possible structure, visuals, user flows, and layouts) and (2) High – fidelity prototyping (shows almost all of the product’s aspects, including intricate user interfaces and working pages and elements).

  • CI / CD Pipeline: CI/CD is a commonly used acronym in software development. It stands for “continuous integration” and “continuous delivery.” Although these are distinct concepts, they are often treated as though they are one. Continuous Integration is a standard development process where all code in a project is regularly committed to a single branch, whether the development that work is part of is complete or not. Continuous delivery is a regular process that packages up the deployment unit or units that comprise the codebase’s outputs. Automation is ideal for CI and CD practices, since they require the same actions be performed on a regular basis. The automation of CI and CD processes is typically referred to as “pipelines,” an analogy of traditional factory product automation pipelines.  Either a single team can build and maintain the pipeline to production (a purer DevOps model), or the CI/CD pipeline can deliver a stable and more tested set of build artifacts to a separate operations team for deployment. A CI/CD pipeline also facilitates the introduction of other changes that can improve reliability.

Conclusion :

By responding rapidly to changes and adapting their plans accordingly, the Agile delivery teams are able to deliver top-quality products and services in an efficient manner. An agile framework helps in better collaboration, customer focus and iterative development. From a client’s viewpoint, agile software methods are very helpful as they allow for much more flexibility and responsiveness to changes over other traditional models. One of the most striking points about the agile methodology is that they tend to focus on delivering superior value to customers, rather than merely meeting internal timelines.

References

Blogs

New Ways of Working – Drive Business Agility

Business Agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative, digitally enabled business solutions. Everything moves fast in the digital age. Customer desires, competitive threats, technology choices, business expectations, revenue opportunities, and workforce demands now happen at blistering speeds. Today, achieving customer delight at the speed of market changes requires validating innovations with customers and then ensuring that the implementation takes place as soon as possible. Moreover, significant technological advances are unlocking new ways to create this value. For example, AI, Big Data, Cloud, and DevOps enable enterprises to expand their product lines, modernize their existing offerings, scale to mass markets, make fact-based decisions, and streamline solution development.

Every company is embracing Agile as New Ways of Working (NWOW). Agile runs on the principle of “Inspect & Adapt” and focusses on driving value to business by imbibing flexibility into the planning phase and multiple shorter release plans (per Sprint or per a pre-defined number of Sprints). Teams reflect post every Sprint to check if anything can be improved and adjust their strategy for the forthcoming sprint. A few of the commonly use Agile Frameworks are as below:

  • Scrum – the most popularly used Agile framework for software development projects.
  • Kanban – used in individual business departments or for Managed Services, in order to provide the desired visibility over the tasks of the team members.
  • SAFe – used primarily to deliver complex solutions that require more than 50 people.
  • XP – primarily used in projects where the customer requirements change very frequently.
  • FDD – used mainly in long-term, complex software development projects where features are continually added or changed.
  • DSDM – Nowadays primarily widely used in project management in general as it focusses more on the entire project lifecycle.

 

Below is a curated list of best practices that drive Agility today:

  • Shift Left: The principle of Shift Left is to take a task that’s traditionally done at a later stage of the process and perform that task at earlier stages. An example of this is testing. With the traditional Waterfall model, testing is done just before releasing the product into production. This means that serious problems uncovered so late can cause major redesign and long delays. Shift Left Testing addresses this by involving testing teams early in the process. Issues, be it in design or code, can be solved early on before they become major. In fact, shift-left is less about problem detection and more about problem prevention.

  • Prototype Design Thinking:  Creating a physical version of a concept or experiment is a process known as prototyping. A prototype is basically a mockup of the solution that we want to create. Prototyping is a crucial phase in the Design Thinking process. Designers build an almost-working version or mockup of the product, known as a prototype, and test it with potential customers and stakeholders to see whether it truly answers the problems of its consumers. The purpose of creating the design thinking prototype is to check the viability of the existing design and possibly look into what potential customers may have to say about the product. It permits appropriate testing and investigation of design ideas before excessive resources are employed. There are two types – (1) Low – fidelity prototyping (presents the simplest possible structure, visuals, user flows, and layouts) and (2) High – fidelity prototyping (shows almost all of the product’s aspects, including intricate user interfaces and working pages and elements).

  • CI / CD Pipeline: CI/CD is a commonly used acronym in software development. It stands for “continuous integration” and “continuous delivery.” Although these are distinct concepts, they are often treated as though they are one. Continuous Integration is a standard development process where all code in a project is regularly committed to a single branch, whether the development that work is part of is complete or not. Continuous delivery is a regular process that packages up the deployment unit or units that comprise the codebase’s outputs. Automation is ideal for CI and CD practices, since they require the same actions be performed on a regular basis. The automation of CI and CD processes is typically referred to as “pipelines,” an analogy of traditional factory product automation pipelines.  Either a single team can build and maintain the pipeline to production (a purer DevOps model), or the CI/CD pipeline can deliver a stable and more tested set of build artifacts to a separate operations team for deployment. A CI/CD pipeline also facilitates the introduction of other changes that can improve reliability.

Conclusion :

By responding rapidly to changes and adapting their plans accordingly, the Agile delivery teams are able to deliver top-quality products and services in an efficient manner. An agile framework helps in better collaboration, customer focus and iterative development. From a client’s viewpoint, agile software methods are very helpful as they allow for much more flexibility and responsiveness to changes over other traditional models. One of the most striking points about the agile methodology is that they tend to focus on delivering superior value to customers, rather than merely meeting internal timelines.

References