When to be Agile?

Dynamism of Market

Agile approach can really help you if you're making business on dynamic, fast changing market. Because of short time planning and quick releases you can faster time to market of your product (or service).

Agile can also help you if you're dealing with problems listed below:

• You're losing market share (competitors are faster)
• You're customers often change requirements or there is no involvment from business side (no feedback)
• Your deliveries are late or obsolete
• You're dealing with big bang delivery at end which usually consists a lot of bugs
• Lack of product vision
• No planning or inflexible planning
• Estimations are becoming commitment

Complexity of Problem

Ralph Stacey Complexity Model

There are two axis on below chart - the first is the certainty of technology and the second is the agreement when it comes to requirements. In a world where you are almost 100% sure or close enough about the technology that will be used AND you know your all or almost all customer's requirements you can use any plan-driven project management methodology (i.e. Waterfall). This is because the "project" is rather simple and occupies place on the bottom left of the chart.

On the other hand the where knowledge about technology is far from certainty AND the agreement when it comes to requirements is far away we enter an area on the chart where COMPLEXITY ocurrs. The sweet spot for Agile is somewhere in the middle. A "project" where the certainty is unsure and/or the agreement when it comes to requirements unclear you should consider to use preferred Agile framework (i.e. Scrum). Any other product management methodology probably will fail here.

Agile is based on empirical process and helps if you don‘t know the possible situations upfront, requirements often change and final result is unknown at the beginning.

Morale of People

Agile highlights the importance of people according to the rule "first build people, then products". If you really want to have well motivated people you need to invest on them and what is even more imporant - stop name them 'resources' and start listen them and collaborate with them!

People need autonomy to organize their work, they aqquire for mastery, to become better and better on their work and real purpose (vision), to have feeling of contribution and accautability.

So as you see now, money and external rewards are not the only factor that morivates people in cognitive, complex and creative environment.

Agile can also help you if you're dealing with problems listed below:

• Team is beaten down
• There is lack of collaboration through the team
• Company culture is tough and old-fashioned
• Team is relocated and even worse, there are time zone differences
• Organization structure is relly huge and definitely not flat
• Poor management which likes 'command-and-control' way of managing
• Lack of product success and no accountability