Agile

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Chapter 1: Introduction
Hello, and welcome to our series of lessons on Agile.

The fast-moving digital world has embraced Agile working with open arms. As the
industry bloats with innovative products and companies, market competition is rife,
and businesses have a need to rise above their competitors and get their products
quickly to their customers, many businesses have moved to a different way of
working that puts customers at the heart of product and service development.

In these lessons, we’re going to tell you what Agile is and we’ll cover the most
popular methodologies. We’ll also explore how Agile can be adopted across the
entire business, and take you through some practical ways you can start using it to
develop products, run projects and even how you can use it in your everyday
working life.

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Chapter 2: What is Agile?

So, we know that Agile is about putting the customer first in your business but what
does that really mean?

According to best practice, Agile is a way of working that empowers teams to get
functional products and services to market as soon as possible without any wasteful
frills. This iterative approach means that a business can get simple, working
products into the hands of their customers much quicker than competitors and gain
valuable feedback on how they’re being used.

This important feedback loop allows companies to constantly update products and
services based upon real users’ needs. It also enables businesses to react quickly to
competitor moves.

The Agile Manifesto is built around four pillars that inspire teams and businesses to
get the most from this way of working. These are...

• Empower your team

• Getting Functional Features out Quickly

• Customer Collaboration, and

• Responding to change

Let’s apply the four pillars to a project.

First up: Empower your team.

Rather than getting a fifty-page complicated brief from management, a team made
up of marketers, content specialists and designers have come together to work on
an advertorial campaign for Meeco, an ethical fashion brand. They talk to each other
to gather the requirements of the campaign, decide upon the best solution and how
they should successfully deliver the advertorial.

Second: Getting Functional Features out Quickly.

Instead of spending ages writing down the scope and delivering the finished
campaign all in one go, the advertorial campaign team have decided to prioritise the
messaging of the campaign first and getting that delivered, rather than painstakingly

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tweaking the design to be pixel-perfect. They put together an advertorial around

Clean Living as many popular Instagrammers and bloggers are gaining popularity
with their posts on mindfulness and minimising their environmental footprint.

Third: Customer Collaboration.

The team pre-test the Clean Living message with customers and get good feedback
from their young target market but the message isn’t resonating with their key target
market who are ethical shoppers aged between 35 - 45. The team refine the copy as
their core audience tell them they care more about the sourcing of materials and a
quality finish. The customer is king for an agile team so by collaborating with
customers at an early stage, the team can produce a result that resonates with its
core customer base.

And the fourth pillar: Responding to change.

As the advertorial campaign evolves and the designs are almost complete, a major
news story breaks about child labour being used in clothing production and their
core audience floods the customer service line to ask questions about how Meeco
produces its clothing. The agile team pick up on this and change the angle of the
advertorial to focus on the ethical nature of the brand and make a political statement
about fair treatment of workers. Being able to respond in real-time ensures the
campaign is contemporary and resonates with its core customer base.

So, Agile working really does empower the team to put the customer at the heart of
everything that they do, but how else does it differ from other ways of working?

Historically, Agile has been used primarily for software development teams, yet
Agile has its roots in car manufacturing, demonstrating that its principles can be
applied to almost anything.

Agile methodologies were built as a response to solving the issues that come with
pre-defined, pre-budgeted, and pre-planned projects with a single delivery at the
end - otherwise known as “Waterfall” projects. Agile turns the typical Waterfall
approach on its head and does away with set scope, budget and dates, which is
important for accommodating change.

Waterfall projects start with a pre-written scope document, outlining exactly what will
be delivered and how. Sign-off is required on the features up front before anything is
created, meaning that there is no room for change later unless you involve many
layers of management.

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Waterfall projects also need to set customer expectations up front about delivery
dates, often with a single delivery of that pre-defined signed off scope at the end.
This means that the customer knows exactly what they are getting and when.

This might sound sensible enough, but it can be problematic, especially for large
projects that run for months or even years - enough time for the environment to
change and customer needs to become something completely different, rendering
the delivery of the project useless.

An agile project, on the other hand, would start with some high-level ideas and work
with the customer to better define them - frequently delivering these ideas as
functional features in order to get feedback and then tweaking the features
according to what offers the most value to the customer at that time.

Agile projects don’t have upfront dates set to avoid the problems associated with
Waterfall; as they deliver small increments frequently, there’s no “end date” to the
project - the project is always changing to accommodate customer feedback.

So as you can see, Agile is very different from traditional approaches. If you’ve been
on a team that has used Waterfall to manage a project, perhaps you can relate to
some of the issues we’ve talked about.

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Chapter 3: The Rules of Agile

Agile is more often used for rolling product development, where a product develops
according to how real people use and respond to it, based upon feedback on what a
business needs to do to improve it.

These product development requirements are collected in something called a

“product backlog” and a Product Owner or PO, who is the voice of the customer, is
in charge of ensuring the backlog is tackled in a priority order. This way, the team is
always delivering the most important and valuable requirements to the end user.

So far, we’ve spoken about agile as a way of working where customer collaboration
and iteration are key. However, there are different types of agile working, so let’s
take a look at the rules.

Perhaps the most well known agile methodology is Scrum. You might know the word
“scrum” from rugby games, where the players form a self-organising unit to push the
ball in the same direction to score a try.

In agile, the team work together to push their work in the same ‘direction’ - to
delivery - to ‘score’ the satisfaction of the customer. A Scrum team is made up of the
Product Owner, the Scrum Master, and the “development team” - the self-organising,
cross-functional group of motivated individuals who do the work.

A Scrum team break their work into small, manageable, but always individually
functional and value-adding chunks, that can be completed within a pre-planned
timebox, known as a sprint.

It’s a goal-focused approach and the team, as the empowered decision-makers,

agree to a (imaginary) contract to deliver the sprint according to what’s been
committed to in sprint planning - a session facilitated at the beginning of each sprint
for the team to agree how many small chunks will be completed.

Each day the team will update each other, and any attendees external to the team,
on their progress in a daily stand up. At the end of each sprint, the team demo their
completed work to stakeholders and customers and hear feedback to work on in the
next sprint. Before the sprint is closed, a sprint retrospective is held, where the team
reflect together on what they have done well in the last iteration and what could be
improved. They then commit to a set of actions that will help them improve, as part of
the agile cycle of continuous improvement.

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Another popular agile methodology is Kanban, the rules of which are based on the
production line system for supermarkets and car manufacturing.

Kanban focuses on the flow of work and, unlike Scrum, does not have predefined
timeboxes and work is not rigidly planned up front. Like supermarket shelves are
stocked when they run empty, and customers can take goods from the shelves, for
them to get restocked again, a Kanban team “pull” work from a To Do pile - or the
“stock”, according to available capacity - or the empty “shelf”.

Each member only focuses on one chunk of work at a time, which is known as a
“work in progress limit”, reducing context switching and therefore allowing the team
to be more productive. When they are finished with that chunk of work, they will put
it aside as Done, and pull the next item from the To Do pile, and so the
manufacturing line repeats continually.

Kanban stresses the importance of visualising work; in fact, the word “kanban”
means “billboard” or “sign” in Japanese, and represents the cards on which the task
is written and made available for everyone to see, giving visibility on the process and
the progress of each task. The “kanbans” are visible at every stage of the production
line. As with any agile process, Kanban celebrates the notion of continuous
improvement, and the team regularly get together to reflect on how well they’re
working together and how efficient the process is, in order to put steps in place to
eliminate anything wasteful and improve.

Agile takes a lot of its fundamentals from a higher level of process around product
manufacturing, which is known as “Lean”. Lean has its roots in Japanese
manufacturing and has a primary aim of reducing waste without sacrificing
productivity.

While Lean was originally created to support manufacturing, its ideologies were
adapted for software development in the early 2000s, and we can see it today
being applied to digital start ups and agencies worldwide.

While methodologies we consider to be “agile” centre mostly around getting

functional and valuable products into the hands of customers quickly, Lean has a
separate set of principles that focuses as much on efficiency as it does on customer
satisfaction:

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The rules are:

• Deliver fast and optimise the whole end-to-end process

• Delay decisions and commitments

• Eliminate waste

• Respect people

• Build quality and develop knowledge

The core of Lean specifies ruthlessly getting rid of anything that is not adding value
to the process or the product, which could refer to meetings, animation or design,
documentation, or even environmental factors that prevent workers from producing
at full capacity - such as multi-tasking. Quality of the work is important, too, because
any rework means what was previously done is wasted, and so this needs to be
avoided and quality built into the product.

In Lean, planning is kept to a minimum. Considering what’s needed for the future is
wasteful because it could change, so decisions are put off until the very last moment.
We can compare a lot of these principles to what we’ve learned so far from agile.

For example, the focus on speed of delivery to the customer and iterating on a
simple concept based on feedback loops in agile practises are influenced by the
elimination of waste we see in Lean. Agile teams anticipate change from the
customer and so might choose to delay making decisions about exactly how
something might work until that feedback loop is in progress.

Both agile and Lean processes empower the workers on the ground, and top heavy
micromanagement is discouraged, instead employing trust in those doing the work
to know how best to do it.

As it does away with processes and structure, many companies shy away from Lean
theories. However, it has recently become a popular methodology with startups
in particular, as it provides the perfect platform for fast product delivery straight to
customers, with minimum investment. This way, companies can take more risks
around innovation and become industry frontrunners with a simple idea.

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Chapter 4: Driving Innovation & Continuous Improvement

It’s not only start-ups that are benefiting from agile and Lean processes. The wider
digital industry are adopting it too. As customers are becoming more demanding of
the products that they use, and have a wider choice than ever before, businesses are
using this way of working to drive wholesale innovation.

Over recent years, many digital businesses have identified the need to address
problems with non-functional products and frustrated customers, born out of long
and convoluted projects that did not result in delivering user value.

And while existing products face the challenge of proactively responding to new
competition in the market, those new competitors must be able to get innovative and
useful products to their customers quickly to have a chance of succeeding in the
constantly bloating digital space.

As a startup, cloud storage solution Dropbox identified a small gap in the storage
market but faced challenges around creating a valuable and innovative product as a
small fish in a big pond of large competitors.

The Dropbox team decided to adopt some of the agile concepts around customer
collaboration to support bringing its first product to market. The company built a
manifesto around understanding its customers and the problems it wanted to solve
for them from the very beginning, adopting the motto “learn early, learn often”, and
reached out to potential customers to ask them what they valued in a storage
product.

Armed with this knowledge, Dropbox created the simplest functional thing it could as
a first iteration of its product - also known as a “Minimum Viable Product (or MVP)” -
and immediately put it in the hands of those potential customers.

By starting with something so simple that “just worked” and delivered solutions
directly to the users, the company had invested the minimum effort in order to get
feedback from real customers on its idea. The product could then evolve continually
based on what the paying customer wanted, earning Dropbox a rise from 100,000 to
4 million users in a little over a year.

By delivering functional products incrementally instead of as one large batch, each

new increment can respond to changing requirements without creating wasted work
or complex change management systems. Defining your MVP - the simplest possible
version of your product that is functional and satisfies basic requirements - is crucial

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for a new product to eliminate waste in their process and to have the opportunity to
respond to their customers.

An important aspect of agile working is taking the opportunity to reflect on how the
team and its individuals are working. This is part of the agile value of continuous
improvement, with the goal of streamlining processes and ultimately speeding
delivery up.

Continuous improvement always follows a cycle of identify, commit, execute,

review.

1. The team reflects on their actions and the tools and processes they’re using.
They identify the things they’re doing that are a success, the things that are
causing them problems, or are a waste and do not offer value.

2. As a collective they make a commitment to improve those things, putting in

place tangible and measurable actions to achieve those improvements;

3. They execute those actions, perhaps as part of the next iteration;

4. The team then come together again to reflect on whether or not those actions
were successful in improving what they identified at the beginning of the
cycle, and so the cycle continues.

By continuously reflecting on how they are doing and committing to getting better, a
team allows themselves to adapt positively to changing environments and ultimately
become more efficient. Let’s see how this could be put into practise.

A marketing event running over a period of five days could plan for continuous
improvement on a daily basis. The team would get together for a short session at the
end of the first day, recap on the day and identify what’s gone well and what hasn’t.

They’ll commit to things to do the next day to improve on the first day. After
executing those actions on the second day, they’ll get together again and review
how successful those improvements have been; perhaps they observe that the
throughflow and sign ups from potential customers have really improved, and they
put this down to the room layout change they’ve implemented. In other areas -
perhaps capturing the event on video to promote on social media - the team thinks
things have gotten worse and the switch in production strategy for the video was a
gamble that didn’t pay off.

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The team can again identify that the room layout is a good thing and they commit to
keeping this, but that the video strategy needs more attention, so they focus on
tweaking this to execute the next day.

By continuously reviewing across the five days, the marketing team can make small
changes that make a significant difference to the overall success of the event.

So as this example shows, Agile can be applied to basically anything - whether that’s
a product or service development or an external event to showcase your business.

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Chapter 5: Summary
In this lesson, we have explored how agile puts customers first and aims to deliver
functional products to them in the shortest amount of time, giving agile businesses
the upper hand in satisfying paying users and getting their repeat business.

Agile paves the way for increased efficiency - through eliminating waste and
reducing managerial overheads - which is clearly attractive for businesses as
efficiency leads to reduced costs.

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