Businesses are in fierce competition for visibility and recognition in this rapid influx of products and services. Therefore, they can’t afford to spend a lot of time in a market that is all about leveraging the power of innovation and crafting digital experiences as soon as possible. 

According to Mckinsey, during the pre-pandemic, 93% of the businesses that had adopted agile experienced better operational growth, 76% reported better employee engagement, and another 93% had recorded better customer experience. These whopping figures depict that digital businesses have accommodated the agile mindset to act fast and take risks in response to the rapid changes, further speeding up agile adoption. 

Top 11 Agile trends that are worth your attention

Fig. Agile Trends in 2022

Agile adoption has been resolving many business needs like

• Building efficient systems
• Improving team collaboration 
• Increasing productivity

To adopt an agile framework in your organization, it is important to understand the current agile trends.

Design Thinking: Design thinking emphasizes developing customer-centric products precisely aligning with the needs and requirements of the end-user. This concept ensures the developing products empathize with the user, resulting in increased customer value and satisfaction. 

While design thinking is all about discovering and providing solutions to a problem, the agile method focuses on delivering the project by iterating through continuous feedback loops. 

By integrating agile processes in the early phase of ‘design thinking’ based projects, you can reduce risks and costly redesign cycles. Also, it reduces the development time and testing cycles.

The best example of design thinking with agile methodology is Netflix. 

Netflix is an industry giant that has mastered the art of leveraging the potential of design thinking from time to time. Netflix acknowledged the consumers’ demands for original content that wasn't airing on traditional televisions and started streaming fresh content in 2011. In 2016, it further added short trailers to improve the user experience. Also, during its inception, it started delivering DVDs to customers' homes with a subscription model, eliminating the pain point of driving back and forth to the brick-and-mortar store for the DVDs. If you closely observe, its major updates surround resolving customer pain points and indicate an effective design thinking process. 

Adoption of Agile Mindset in Business Agility: According to Agile Business Consortium, “An agile business can respond quickly and effectively to opportunities and threats found in its internal and external environments.”. 

Fig. Levels of business agility

Business agility is how a company responds and adapts to rapid changes in the market. It is centered around flexibility to handle operations and resources responsively, thus driving maximum business value. Therefore to help businesses become more flexible and responsive, it’s important for them to focus on strategy, organization, and operation agility by identifying the potential opportunities and tapping into the market. 

The failure of brands like Blackberry, Blockbuster Inc, etc.,  are some popular examples of having a lack of business agility that failed to adapt to changing market requirements, leading to consumer dissatisfaction. 

The dominance of Scaled Agile Framework: The agile methodologies have been widely adopted and acknowledged over the years. Today, Agile isn't limited only to individuals, but even at team levels. Now, Agile is all set to impact PAN organizations across multiple teams at scale. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is gaining a lot of attention from enterprises that are planning to go agile for achieving greater efficiency, resilience, and collaboration on a larger scale. 

One of the examples is Barclay. The financial service company wanted to scale and integrate its agile teams into a more effective unit for streamlined processes. So, it chose an agile learning and delivery approach for a more collaborative workspace. Thanks to the new agile process implementation, Barclay achieved quick delivery, shorter release cycles, high-quality solutions, quick time-to-market with new products, feedback, and faster response. 

The all-time popular kid - Scrum: If you are a project manager who is looking to coordinate all the tasks of cross-functional teams, then the Scrum development approach is the right take. This approach enables effective team collaboration for delivering product features and high-value functionalities, resulting in higher business value. In fact, 81% of agile teams are using some or the other versions of Scrum. 

Some of the popular industries that are using Scrum are financial services, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, education, automotive, manufacturing, and hospitality. Popular companies that are leveraging the benefits of Scrum in their businesses are Apple, Bank of Ireland, HSBC, Google, Lego, Salesforce, Spotify, Netflix, and Airbnb. 

The Prominence of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Methodologies for Agile: Requirement analysis is a crucial step in the development process. AI and ML run at full steam to gather data during this step with greater accuracy and automation. With AI and ML in your agile methodology, you’ll get some deep insights through real-time data and analytical capabilities for better decision-making and faster execution.

Leverage the following benefits of these disruptive technologies:

• Precise code and data insights 
• Better accuracy to identify and eliminate bugs from the code
• Accelerate the development process through the integration of cutting-edge technologies and devices such as IoT, etc., to get products to the market quickly. 

Working in Agile with Remote Teams: Remote work is here to stay. The pandemic has paved the way for remote working with effective team collaboration across distances. 2022 will be all about organizations emphasizing agile practices among remote workers in the digital space. The agile remote work will portray how managers can define KPIs, measure outcomes, and align business goals through virtual collaborations among the team members with a wide array of tools and technologies at affordable rates. 

The surviving story of Agile HR: During the pandemic, the HR services have been facing operation silos even though they are learning, adapting, and engaging in work virtually. Being a service-based domain, the HR portfolio has multiple functionalities like hiring, onboarding, payroll, etc., throughout the year, depicting the need for various products. Thus, 2022 is all about how organizations will combat the challenges of this domain with agile product management, and how Agile HR will define responsiveness and adaptiveness within the HR functions like employee management, feedback, performance management, retention, etc., using these products. 

The rising demands for Agile tools and frameworks: Atlassian, JIRA, and Trello are some of the most common tools for coordinating projects and communication. The number of users of these tools indicates the heavy reliance on technology for carrying out business operations seamlessly. But, these tools will need upgrades with the advancement of technology and with the increase in complex applications. Thus, this year the trend to customize these tools will be on top of the ladder as per the user priorities. 

The Agile governance trend: To drive digital business transformation at scale, it becomes important to establish an Agile Center of Excellence (Agile CoE). In 2022, this will be a higher priority as companies, irrespective of their sizes, are looking forward to overseeing, monitoring, guiding, and managing all their agile projects at different levels with transparency. 

DevOps & Agile: Another vital trend that organizations are embracing is-combining DevOps with agile methodologies to gain tangible benefits of delivering quality software. As the product matures, its software development complexities also increase, making it difficult to enhance and test. This creates bottlenecks for the operations team as they fail to expedite the delivery of release cycles due to a lack of quick fixes, easy-to-implement solutions, planning, and structure. To overcome these hurdles, organizations adopt DevOps practice, which facilitates a handshake between these teams.

After a long struggle with slow and painful deployments, Etsy decided to allow developers to deploy their codes in 2009. The idea behind this was the Agile mindset where developers could build, test, deploy, and monitor applications with speed, control, and quality. 

They realized that if developers can take responsibility for their deployed codes, they will take responsibility for application uptime, performance, and other goals. 

This way, the company could deal with silos and the teams that weren't working together. 

Moreover, embracing DevOps resulted in higher release frequency and CI/CD pipeline across platforms and operating teams. Now, Etsy deploys over 60-times per day, which is a result of embracing DevOps with agile, helping them to quickly develop, implement, and analyze their codes and overcome resistance to the transition without productivity loss.

Value Stream Management (VSM): Every company is a software company, but the journey doesn’t stop just there. It is important to be a high-performing one. This is where VSM walks in. It is a practice or management technique to measure the delivered value to the end-user. VSM is gaining traction to gauge deliverables in an SDLC end-to-end. With VSM, you can witness greater customer satisfaction, thus resulting in organizational growth. 2022 will be about how agile teams will focus on VSM for delivering better customer value.

In a nutshell,

To stay relevant in this faced-paced digital landscape, Agile is the way to go. However, it requires disciplined leadership to implement, skilled teams to adopt, and extensive experience to create value. But this shift in culture cannot be achieved overnight and would require partnering with a truly agile enterprise like Srijan. Having worked with multiple clients across numerous domains, we have helped organizations bring in agile maturity to their processes. To explore what we can do for you,  get in touch today!