The Agile Manifesto laid the foundation for Agile Project Management. 17 software developers found the answer to the archaic heavyweight project management methodologies.
Fast forward to two decades later, agile adoption rate has gone from a mere 37% in 2020 to 86% in 2021.
That’s a marvel!
When businesses worldwide are reaping the benefits of Agile Project Management, why should you be left out?
But, before we learn the benefits, we shall learn the definition of agile and the reasons for its popularity.
What is Agile Project Management?
Agile Project Management is a methodology based on iterations that breaks down the entire project into small cycles called Sprints which last 1-4 weeks. The objective of every sprint is to deliver business value and continuous improvement.
The Agile Manifesto is built on the Agile values-
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Reasons for Agile popularity by statistics
Agile’s popularity can be attributed to the following reasons. As per the 15th State
of Agile Report, the following were reasons for adopting agile-
- 64% of the respondents stated enhance ability to manage changing priorities
- 64% reported Accelerating software delivery
- 47% mentioned increase team productivity
- 42% answered Enhancing software quality
- 39% wanted to reduce project risk
- 23% implemented it to reduce project cost
That’s 6 different reasons for agile adoption and what does that tell you?
Here are 10 benefits of Agile Project Management that can help take a call to help change your present for a better tomorrow-
1. Quality par excellence
When using Agile for software development, product features are built incrementally and not all at once. The project is broken down into phases to ensure superior quality development, testing, and collaboration.
After a feature is built, testing is conducted to ensure quality. Clients are also kept in loop and the product is built according to their wishes. Since testing is done regularly, any defects are identified before the final product is built.
2. Decreases Technical Debt
Technical Debt refers to the maintenance tasks that are required to support the current product.
Defect resolution, refactoring, and testing are the maintenance tasks. Agile is a magic bullet to reduce technical debt. If any features, maintenance tasks, or bugs need to be resolved, it is added to the product backlog.
Before the start of every new sprint, the team reviews the product backlog to determine the important feature to be added.
3. Faster Time to Market
Since, Agile methodology emphasizes on a working product, you stand to gain when you launch your product which serves as minimum viable product (MVP).
This gives the first mover advantage in some cases.
4. Constant delivery and Improvement
Working on self-improvement and striving for perfection is one of the 12 principles of Agile. Since Agile is an iterative process, every sprint is better than the last and no mistakes are repeated.
Agile focuses on constant delivery and improvement. Team members can communicate freely and collaborate to share learnings and learn from each other.
5. Happier Clients
Customer satisfaction is always the core focus in Agile methodology. Customers are always part of the feedback loop and their review is taken after every sprint.
In traditional development methodology, the customer is only involved in the planning phase of the project. Agile ensures the client participates in the entire development process and the end product is as per their liking.
6. User centric testing
All products are developed through user stories. User stories are a depiction of software features from the perspective of the end users.
Large tasks are called Epics. These Epics are broken down into user stories. The user stories are then divided into tasks and sub tasks. This helps them build small portions of a large project easily.
7. Renewed Project Predictability
With a time bound and iterative approach, the project delivery is easily predictable. Agile allows timely delivery of the projects with early identification of risks and defects.
Bottomline
Agile has its challenges when it comes to adopting it but the benefits are numerous. The latter outweighs the former and this alone should give you the drive to orchestrate an agile transformation.
Implementing Agile is not going to be smooth as a lot of hurdles need to be overcome but an Agile Coach can make it a reality.
