Has anyone successfully used agile outside of software development?
For business as a whole?
ForProjects which are not focused on Software?
Hi NZDQ,
It depends what you mean by 'agile'. If you mean the Agile Manifesto yes I have applied those principles with many clients (I replace 'working software' with 'working solution). If you mean using Scrum or another software development methodology in another environment, then not exactly since those methodologies are really geared towards developing software. I have read about businesses (one was featured in Inc. magazine) who have implemented 'daily scrums' across their organization and use a scrum of scrum methodology to update higher level managers.
When I wrote about adopting Agile principles to the larger enterprise last year, many Agile experts had mixed thoughts on this topic - some didn't see the relevance or connection while others thought that the principles could enable an 'Agile enterprise'.
Hi Larimar, Im going to see if I can find the Inc magazine article you mentioned?
Whilst my company does produce software as part of a solution, I wanted to know if I could look at using Agile across the entire solution project successfully. This would fit in with our shift to a lean productivity would you say?
I think you could definitely investigate the merits of using an Agile methodology like Scrum for the overall project. For awhile I ran a team of Business Analysts in an Agile fashion independent of a software development project. While it was an interesting experiment for us we decided to revert to a more traditional analysis approach given the regulatory environment we were in meant that there was little need to adapt to change in the short term.
I've helped teams implement scrum in a coupole of non IT contexts; academics working together on research, community organsiations coming together and running events and in the legal industry.
Scrum isn't software specific. It's a team based way of working. It's not applicable with a team of say 2, or with one person alone. Why waste time on the overhead in these cases?
Kanban and Lead development are rooted in procvess management anyway and have only relatively recently come to the software world. Also useful for individuals.
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