Making your chosen agile methodology work – Part 3: outside the box
Welcome back to the final instalment of our three-part agile methodology overview series. Over the last two posts we’ve explored some of the best- and least-known agile methodology approaches, ranging from the most common methods to lesser used solutions.
Today, we’re wrapping up by going a little outside of the box and turning our attention to some other frameworks that we know enterprises like to look at – and certainly may be of some value to your organization, too!
As organizations move away from slow, expensive project methodologies and towards fast, adaptive product approaches, the next set of frameworks can help take your way of working and improve the Value, Flow and Quality of your ideas.
DevOps
DevOps is defined as “… a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality.” It’s often used in conjunction with agile ways of working, and centrally focused on the handover between technology development and technology operations.
Lean StartUp
Eric Ries has brought the lean startup to an enterprise context over the last decade. His books, The Lean Startup and The Startup Way, are as appealing to enterprises as they are to startups. It’s rooted in the original work by Steve Blank, which helps you to place customers at the heart of your business model search and discovery process, and then provides guidance on when you might pivot, persevere or perish an idea.
Design Thinking
Design Thinking is often used alongside Agile or product development today. It has been developed by Tim Brown and leaders at Ideo. They have argued it is really a way of thinking rather than a framework, even though there are toolkits and frameworks available. They argue that if you can think like a designer, you can solve problems more completely and help build better change, products and services.
Wrapping things up
As you can see over our last three blogs, the agile approach comes with a pretty complicated landscape! There are a lot of opinions on what works and what doesn’t. At Emergn, we use three guiding agile principles to help us judge whether a client’s way of working is… working. Regardless of the method or framework, is it helping to bring new ideas to life in a productive way? These principles have measurements built in, in order to:
- Deliver value early and often
- Optimize the flow of work from end to end
- Discover quality with fast feedback
Read Part 1 of this series, as we dig into the more common frameworks, methodologies and guides available out there.
Additional Insights
Embracing uncertainty when making technology investments
Make overcoming transformation fatigue your unfair competitive advantage
The five key areas of transformation fatigue
