If you are looking for business innovation and want to scale up, think of Agile. Traditional business strategies and project planning are not going to work. In this fast-paced, competitive business environment, Agile has become one of the major business needs to sustain and profit. This business world is moving at a faster pace than ever before. With new technological, cultural, and business trends and rapid shifts, there is a need to hold onto something more quick and adaptive.
One such thing is Agile. A lot of businesses are making a move towards Agile – a fast, empirical, cross-functional, focused, iterative, and continually improving the software development method. Innovating and scaling up with Agile needs a lot of effort. When done right, Agile can offer amazing results for large enterprises.
As Agile aims at improving the quality of software, it leads to overall improvements in development, responsiveness, and customer satisfaction.
4 best practices to innovate and scale up with Agile
If you are searching for some best practices to innovate and scale up with Agile, here are 4 best practices you need to consider:
- Start from the top
To bring innovation, the top management needs to be actively involved. If the business wants to go Agile, senior leaders have a great role to play in. Only the, all the cultural barriers and root problems can be addressed and eliminated. Agile transformations are different from other kinds of business transformations. And so, they require higher leader input so that the entire enterprise moves into an unfamiliar direction.
Without complete and immense support from the top, Agile methods and practices are not only difficult to adopt but eventually result in a business’s doom rather than success.
- Know your customer well
When innovating and scaling up with Agile is concerned, the entire focus has to be laid upon delivering value to your customers. Everything else is rendered waste and so, has to be removed from the scaling-up process to achieve effective outcomes.
One main point of consideration is its customer who defines your business value, and not you!
Therefore, it is important to know your customer well. Without that, there are a lot of potential problems. Make sure you are not covering a wide customer base. When your target audience is clearly defined, you can better focus on making good trade-offs.
- Adopt efficient and resulting data gathering techniques
Most businesses try to understand what drives business value for them but fail to adopt the right data gathering techniques. To know the business value you need to deliver, you must adapt efficiently and positively, resulting in data gathering techniques.
For instance, asking open-ended questions from customers often leads to diverse conclusions. To get targeted and focused answers, it is best to offer prototypes and samples to customers. That’s where A/B testing comes as an efficient and resulting data-gathering technique.
- Think of an iterative approach
One thing that helps move from start to the end of a process successfully is an iterative approach. An iterative approach focuses on laying out the entire workflow and dependencies, deduce details and quantify the risks. This way, all the tasks can be managed in a budget. Also, all the potential problems can be identified and solved beforehand.
An iterative approach offers a step-by-step process that ensures employee engagement and topnotch business value.
Conclusion
Agile businesses are growing better than businesses still following traditional business strategies. To innovate and scale up with agile, leader involvement, a well-defined customer base, knowing the business value, and adopting an iterative approach is a must. Also, practices like integrated teams and continuous improvements should be a part of business culture as well. Read more about Agile from customer’s point of view in our previous blog post.
