Agile Project Methodologies: the future or just a passing fad?
The way we live our lives and our expectations as individuals has changed dramatically. I still remember when I would come back from my holiday and eagerly send my photos to some non-descript place to be processed. Perhaps I’d get them 2 to 3 weeks later. Now we think nothing of taking a picture, deleting it and taking another until we are satisfied.
My point is that as a society we’re much more demanding now and we want things sooner and better than ever before.
I think the same is true when approaching projects. In the good old days, it would be pretty acceptable (in fact expected) to spend a big chunk of time in a project understanding business requirements, and then estimating how long it would take to address them. From time to time you’d end up in some sort of loop of playing and replaying back solutions until you get it just right. And then of course a key sponsor may leave and someone new might have a different view of the world!
Spending a large amount of time on defining a solution is a luxury few businesses can afford now. But more importantly, from my perspective this traditional way of doing things often got us into some bad habits where we ended up over-engineering a solution because you simply had that time available.
So now we see more and more businesses opting for what’s being called an ‘Agile’ approach, where requirements and deliverables can be a lot more dynamic.
I think this is exactly right for the world we live in today Businesses are needing to adapt very quickly; what was right as a solution 6 months when an idea was conceived may need serious tweaks to it in order to complete in the marketplace today.
‘Agile’ approaches such as Scrum allow customers to see the output of their ideas faster than using a more traditional methodology where many months could pass before anything is visible.
So I think the move to ‘Agile’ is merely a reflection of the society we live in. We’ll will find it increasingly difficult to metaphorically “wait for our photos to be processed”. Rather, let’s accept business requirements for what they are – a living breathing collection of thoughts that continues to evolve in order for businesses to stay competitive.