Practice, Don’t Preach Agile. Mastering a new way to complete projects takes time. It takes knowledgeable leaders, open-minded employees and the right tools. Rolling out an Agile development process is just this sort of thing. You can’t show a fancy PowerPoint presentation and believe everyone gets it. You also can’t expect everyone to know why you’re actually adopting such a methodology.

Agile requires that your staff work on something real to realize the benefits associated with this process. It requires practicing the concepts behind the method and allowing time to be the real teacher. However, everyone must start somewhere and that’s why Project Cooks, thought-leaders in an Agile industry, comprehensively teaches you how engage and expertly manage an Agile team.

What’s Agile? What’s Scrum?

Agile is a mindset that adopts tools and techniques that help you develop better products. By reducing waste in the development process, your products will more effectively meet your business and customer needs. The benefits range from more collaborative teams to faster decision making and a quicker product-to-market.

Scrums help facilitate those claims by managing complex software and product development, increasing productivity and create cross-functional visibility. They also keep goals on target and all stakeholders involved for a greater quality in the final product.

What’s this all mean?

To put it plainly, adopting an Agile and Scrum process decreases wasted time and increases productivity. It encourages employees to be proactive, make decisions and be accountable. And, at the end of a project, you’re more likely to be on time and on budget with a higher quality product.

How do I know it works?

Every organization has different goals, therefore it’s hard to say X,Y, Z are the results. However, with a transition to Agile you will see that your challenges are discovered more quickly, leading to faster, more superior fixes. You’ll see tasks completed in greater accuracy and feedback delivered in a timely manner.

Face-to-face communication increases alignment and is more specific than sending countless emails and holding regrouping meetings. It’s time well spent instead of time wasted. You’ll notice enhanced visibility that encourages immediate awareness so you’ll back track less. Again, the proof is in the practice.

Where can I start?

The first step is to sign up for one of our Agile Fundamentals courses. It’s the perfect introduction into Agile development. This ICAgile accredited course examines the roles and responsibilities of team members working on Agile projects, explores the specific practices which are used on Agile projects, explains the theory and concepts behind the Agile approach and prepares team members to be immediately productive working in an Agile environment.

By kicking off this form of development, employees will immediately be engaged and with time, you’ll see faster turnaround with fewer errors.