1. What is Agile?
Agile is a set of values and a related collection of methods and tools for managing and delivering projects. Agile emphasizes iterative and incremental development, close collaboration with the customer, and cross-functional teams.
Instead of betting everything on a "big bang" launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments. Requirements, plans, and results are evaluated continuously so teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change quickly.
Agile comes from software development but its principles are widely applicable to how work is planned and completed in virtually any domain.
The core values that shape agile are outlined in the Agile Manifesto, and emphasize the following:
- Individuals and interactions over Processes and tools
- Working software over Comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over Contract negotiation
- Responding to change over Following a plan
2. Why are we doing this?
Following successful implementation of Office 365 Shared Tenant project, where we chose to apply Scrum Methodology, we found many benefits of doing work in agile way. It’s lightweight (little overhead), transparent and most importantly empowering. It empowers customers with short feedback loops and the team with ability to experiment and pivot quickly, when necessary.
Agile way of getting work done is also in-line with President’s Wacker “It’s Time” initiative. When we need to be planful but also take calculated risks (experiment), act quickly and pivot, which is very similar with an agile concept of “failing fast” and not afraid to experiment.
3. Agile in Action in ITS
One of the ITS teams conducting a daily standup to answer three questions:
- What tasks have you worked on since we last talked?
- What tasks are you planning to work on next?
- Is anything getting in the way of finishing the work as expected?
We use taskboards and track every activity from initiation to completion. Every task has an owner and expected date of completion:
We are just in the beginning of our Agile journey and have long ways to perfect this but we are working diligently to make small improvements over time. We utilize techniques such as “Retrospective” to empower team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint.