Agility: What it means to business and why it is a Good Thing.

Back in 2000 Bill Gates wrote ‘Business @ the speed of thought’. As described on the Microsoft website:

Business @ the Speed of Thought was written to inspire you to demand - and get - more from technology, enabling you and your company to respond faster to your customers, adapt to changing business demands, and prosper in the digital economy.

‘Imagine that!’ thought Rudiger, ‘My business being able to respond faster!’ he continued whilst over using exclamation marks… Rudi was in the process of trying to make some small changes to his website before the new season started – or so he thought. The pages were large and overly complex. Working with the marketing department was proving to be a ‘mare. Conversion was plummeting fast and no-one seemed to know why. Rudiger needed answers and actions but they had to be the right ones.

Two pieces of research seemed to point the way. Simultaneously landing in Rudi’s in-box were a Forrester paper on the economic impact of something called ‘Agile’ and a study by JupiterResearch and Akamai Technologies on the detrimental effect of page weight on customer attraction. ‘Could these be the answers?’ thought Rudi, for once avoiding an exclamation opportunity.

Well, the studies are real where poor Rudiger is fictional but he just might sound familiar. The two research papers might turn out to be the solution. Exploring the subject matter further, this series of posts explores a set of simple measures from methodology to technology that enable a wonderful trait known to the cognoscenti as ‘agility’. ‘Please fastbloke, can you explain agility in terms of my business?’ I hear Rudiger ask. Well Rudi, physical agility in humans and animals is defined on dictionary.com as ‘the power of moving quickly and easily; nimbleness’. The second definition (the ability to think and draw conclusions quickly; intellectual acuity) translates more appropriately into the world of e-commerce. Rudi (and you Dear Reader) will soon see how these qualities enable rapid change, enhanced flexibility equating to cost savings, reduced time to market and increased overall effectiveness of your business.

The Agile approach

Waterfall, RAD, RUP, Prince and DSDM are all well known approaches to projects. Let’s take the best bits from each and build a best of breed set of ideas, a framework, a set of guidelines. Let’s not constrain ourselves to rigid, heavyweight doctrine – after all, that’s what we are striving against isn’t it? Hey, rigidity and constraints impact our agility so let’s bring the fight to the fore and call our new approach ‘Agile’!

The thought process may have been different but the end result is what we want to discuss here: Agile is currently hot so let’s explore why and what it could offer to our businesses....next time!