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To be agile is to be flexible yet disciplined. To make and meet commitments but to keep an open mind about things not yet committed. To plan for change. To work as a team.

The core values and principles behind the Agile Manifesto provide the foundation for agile teams to collaborate and converge on working software that adds value at every step along the journey. While we would love to be "purely" agile in everything we do, we understand that projects often require "up-front" defined scope, budgets, and timelines. Project Management discipline and Agile processes must work together to deliver value continuously.

While we choose good tools and follow repeatable processes and rely on automation, it is the Individuals and Interactions that are the center of our focus: whether in-person, socially distanced or remote, frequent communication and collaboration are important. Whether we are just one or two members of your project team, or if your stakeholders are part of our project team, we are one team. As a team, we actively listen, brainstorm, elaborate, challenge, and refine ideas, and adjust priorities as needed to get the job done.

Every sprint cycle (usually 1-4 weeks, depending on the size of the team and project) delivers Working Software. We start with a robust architecture as the "scaffolding" of a solution -- addressing security, user experience, and back-end concerns. Building user stories upon this framework allows hands-on interaction with the evolving system. This allows us all to learn as we go, and to capture and refine our requirements and design decisions as we collaborate.  

Since it is not possible to completely and accurately specify 100% of a project's requirements up-front, we do expect to collaborate with our client so that every detail is elaborated and built into the solution as it is being designed and built. An "early look" at something being designed or built often quickly provokes more detailed and accurate feedback than any amount of forethought could provide. We respect that contracts provide for a well-defined scope & objectives, a budget, timeframes, and constraints.  We value innovation (responding to change) within those constraints and a disciplined change control decision-making process when we need to make contractual adjustments.  We break larger projects into a series of smaller phases so that we can strike a realistic balance between the certainties provided by contracts and the uncertainties to be navigated jointly via collaboration.

We are flexible. We can work on-site or remotely as part of your team or one of your teams. We can provide the whole development team. An agile team should have an allocation of all of the disciplines / skills necessary to deliver the project, including: leadership (a SCRUM Master and Product Owner at minimum), business analyst(s), key subject-matter expert(s) if deep expertise is required, solution and/or software architect(s), infrastructure / operations, and, of course QA / testing. Whether a team member "wears multiple hats" or a part-time or dedicated specialist is needed, the make up of the team needs have the skills to be as self-sufficient as possible and to be allocated as required to avoid delays.

Rhythm is important to effective teamwork. Sprint Planning (where the team selects and commits to the work for the next sprint) and Review meetings (where the team presents what they accomplished and reflects upon lessons learned and improvements to be applied to future sprints) book-end each sprint and are typically full-team events. The daily rhythm of a 15-minute stand-up is vital to identify any blockers so that issues are identified and addressed in a timely manner.

Invariably, everyone wants to know, "What am I getting?", "When will it be done?", "How much will it cost?", and "What are the Risks?" Being Agile does not mean ignoring Project Management. The two disciplines work well together, but from opposite ends. Projects need a solidly defined scope and objectives. They need to have some formulation of value -- costs vs benefits. All projects have a defined start and end.  The Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How Much? are fully within the realm of Project Management and lead to a reliable, predictable path from start to finish. 

Agile is all about acknowledging that we don't know 100% of the "What?" at the beginning. Even if we did, things are subject to change over time -- especially as we learn together along the way. Agile is about the humble, yet bold "Can Do!" attitude of a team that commits to iteratively delivering working software while embracing innovation.

Contact us for a no-obligation working session to help you craft your project concept and formulate some preliminary answers to the above questions to help guide your decision-making. Engage us in more detailed early-stage project planning, feasibility studies, business analysis, and make versus purchase decisions.

Does it take too long to deliver value within your organization? Do you know where your bottlenecks are? We can help you assess your current delivery pipeline and help identify and implement improvements.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment not only accelerate, through automation, the activities of building, configuring and deploying software, they reduce the cost of quality by finding issues earlier, with less effort. Dark deployments allow capabilities and features to be incrementally deployed with low risk, and toggled on or off for evaluation, testing, and release on demand in a staging or production environment.