To stay ahead of the competitive curve, companies adapt to newer technologies and the latest methodologies to quickly develop their products and continuously deliver updates. But following the approach of the traditional software methodologies does not fetch the speed required to meet today’s pace to develop and release a product. Therefore, businesses look for methodologies that enable them to deal with these downfalls of the traditional software and bring about additional benefits to them and their customers.
Enter Agile Methodology. This method helps businesses incorporate the ongoing changes with immense flexibility. In this blog, we discuss the several benefits of Agile Adoption for businesses.
10 Benefits of Agile Adoption
Although Agile is implemented globally by numerous organizations, the benefits of Agile are well documented and projected by the software development teams using it to reduce product development and release times. Today, Agile is adopted across various businesses to streamline their workflows and keep up with the fast-paced technology shift. Numerous industries have carefully analyzed and compared Agile with traditional methodologies. Following this, they chose agile for their business operations so as to accelerate their workflows. Today, agile is a popular choice for modern workplaces.
Here are a few most common agile benefits that organizations drew on adopting agile for their businesses.
- Faster time-to-market: The market and customer demands continuously evolve each day. Hence, there is a possibility that the product developed to address a specific problem statement might not be relevant by the time the product is released. This slow speed of development is one of the major drawbacks of the traditional methodologies that might also affect the business revenue. With an agile adoption framework like Scrum, the time-to-market gets reduced significantly due to its incremental approach and continuous delivery. Agile adoption helps in frequent and consistent delivery of high-quality products, minimizing project overhead, and delivering business value.
- Increased Adaptability: Organizations become more and more complex as it grows. With the increase in complexity, business processes tend to become slower. But organizations want to keep up with the pace of technology adoption and for this, they try to focus on increasing speed without an efficient plan. Moreover, overburdening employees with work will burn them out and will also decrease the system's effectiveness. Therefore, organizations adopt agile for building an effective and responsive system. With agile adoption, organizations can break down the complexity and dependency by working in smaller teams through an iterative path. This adoption will help them eliminate the waste (the processes that don't add value) due to changes in plans, requirements, and market conditions without hampering other units.
- Quick ROI: With agile adoption, there is a significant reduction in product development and release times. This, in turn, reduces the product's time to market and further gives a quick return on investment compared to traditional methodologies.
- Superior Product Quality: Businesses adopt agile methodologies due to their continuous improvement principle. Its iterative approach to building products helps improve each sprint, ensuring that the previous mistakes don't currently repeat. Moreover, the integration of continuous feedback from stakeholders helps build products that align fully to the end user needs, resulting in higher satisfaction. This consistency of continuous feedback and improvement helps to develop stable and superior quality products.
- Continuous feedback for improvement: Agile adoption resolves the pains of traditional feedback systems. The waterfall model lacked feedback loops until the completion of product development. Therefore, there was no error correction mechanism, further wasting the developer's time and efforts. Agile ensures a continuous feedback loop for product enhancement from one phase to another phase. This process eliminates this additional waste of time and effort. The bugs identified from the feedback can be added to the backlog of the next sprint.
- Risk Mitigation: Agile prevents organizations from developing costly failures right from the early stages of development. There's a continuous assessment of the progress during sprints, ensuring better visibility to spot potential issues quickly. This helps to tackle the problems at the early stages before they escalate. Also, agile enables incorporating continuous feedback and delivery of the product in smaller sprints that mitigate the risks as you go ahead with product development.
- Increased Predictability: Agile teams work in sprints. Before starting a sprint, the team comes together and agrees upon the user stories they would work upon, fixing the sprint scope. This process ensures correct resource allocation, proper KPI for team performance, and estimation of time and costs for the project.
- Increased Visibility: Agile increases the transparency among the team members. Every team member is involved in the product development process and collaborates to strategize, design, develop, and report every aspect of the project. None of the processes is done in a silo. Everyone in the team is aware of what others are working on through sprint plans, demos, retrospectives, etc., thus contributing to building a valuable product. This key benefit of agile brings a host of advantages to organizations like decision-making capacity, coordinated pivots, and strategic implementations to adjust to the evolving market. One of the examples is the Kanban board. It is a practical way to increase an organization's visibility by helping to visualize the processes and workflows
- Increased business value: Agile has an iterative approach that allows teams to work in sprints and leverage the learning from the previous sprint to the current one. With the focus on iterative improvement, the team focuses on customers' evolving needs and ensures high-quality product delivery. It helps the team prioritize deliverables at the beginning of each iteration and involves stakeholders for continuous feedback, projecting the customer needs. Hence, this creates customer value by prioritizing deliverables according to stakeholder feedback and needs.
- Increased Customer Satisfaction: Agile teams loop their stakeholders throughout the development process to ensure that their opinions matter and are valued. Every stakeholder wants clarity over the product development process and wants to engage throughout the project life-cycle to provide feedback according to their expectations and needs. Therefore, agile's continuous feedback loop helps the team to build products with exceptional user experience and minimal bugs. With these benefits of using Agile methodologies for your business, you can now outline “Why to adopt agile”. So, if you’re on the edge of agile adoption and want to stay ahead in the competitive curve, you need to know the top 11 agile trends that will help to nudge you in the right direction.
In a nutshell,
In the pre-pandemic, 93% of the companies that adopted the agile model experienced better operational performance. Therefore, organizations from various industries turned to agile methodologies to drive business success by seizing emerging opportunities, as other organizations have been doing it. As the market keeps evolving, businesses need to equip themselves with sustainable solutions in the long run, and here is where Srijan comes in. We help companies to understand the core principles of agile and how they can be implemented across their organization to leverage a host of benefits for business profitability and value. To know more about agile, reach out to us.