In today’s day and age, the problem with Agile Implementation is that most of the Agile practitioners implement Agile without understanding the required business outcome. When we apply or implement Agile, we should keep in mind that idea is not to implement only Agile principles to the T but to achieve business goal.

When we focus too much on Agile implementation over the business, it becomes the recipe for failure. So, here are 3 tips on how to make a perfect match of Agile and Business:

1. Understand the Business

Understanding business is the key thing. Understanding the mission and business vision is very important. Once we understand the vision, we should set goals for achieving it.

2. Understand the problem

Once you understand the business, the next step is deciding how can you achieve this vision. The idea is to work on product/ solution/ problem so that the customer gets value from it.

3. Customer Centricity

Keeping your customer at the core of everything is the way to go. This will help teams work efficiently and achieve better Organizational culture.

So how do we solve business problem while being Agile?

We talked about solving business problem, setting up goal, applying agile thinking to business. Let’s see how we achieve that using our Star Approach: Agile Implementation around business –

Dimension	Focus
Purpose	Break down business vision to goal, focusing on business value outcome
Team Cohesiveness	Building teams, team structure and Self Organization, Collaboration and Communication
Agile ways of working	Agile framework, Agile Values and Principles, Transparency, faster feedback loops and Continuous learning
Environment	Skills, Organization Culture, psychological safety, leadership, and decentralizing decision making
Development practices	Testing hypothesis- Technology, Tools, best practices, Continuous Integration and Continuous delivery

Conclusion:

When you keep just Agile implementation/ Agile methodologies/ ways of working as your focal point then you will just focus on Agile frameworks and delivery methods and lose the sight on the business outcome. This will lead to a perfect path for failure. We must help Teams uncover better ways of building software or solving business problems holistically on all 5 dimensions – Purpose, Team Cohesiveness, Agile Ways of Working, Environment and Development Practices.

If you want to learn more about the Star approach and how can you be successful in Agile Transformation, wait for our next blog.

                                                                                                                                                                                                     -Ramya Shastri