What Business Results to expect from Agile Practices
According to SAFe, the Scaled Agile Framework, companies and organizations can achieve difficult to believe results and business benefits. These benefits range from happier and more motivated employees, quicker time to market with products, increased quality, and improved productivity. Various case studies claim anywhere from 10 - 75% improvement in each of these areas. So are these results real? Check out the case studies at the SAFe website and see for yourself. You can also listen in to our podcast episode on Proven Results with Agile to hear about our experiences and if we achieve anywhere near these type of results.
To help better understand what achieving these results looks like, let’s take a look at some practical examples and how to measure the improvements.
Happier & More Engaged Employees
Employee morale is no doubt a benefit to companies, especially for retainment of key employees and reductions in attrition and hiring costs. It’s debatable whether employers look to Agile practices for this benefit alone, however it’s an excellent side effect a company can realize. The easiest way companies monitor this and determine if there is improvement is through organization and team surveys, attrition rate metrics, and direct feedback from employees and management. For some ideas specifically on how to make Scrum Ceremonies fun for team, check out the podcast episode on Fun with Agile & Scrum Ceremonies.
Faster Time-to-Market
Shorter Time-to-Market is a clear benefit from any Agile methodology, since the various Agile practices are structured around small functional requirements and short release cycles on a consistent cadence. For example, in Scrum, a typical sprint or iteration is in the range of 2 to 4 weeks. If a team or business is running on a 2 week sprint cycle, then every two weeks the business or customer is receiving something functional they can use or the business can generate revenue from. It’s hard to argue that other methodologies that focus on long term release cycles will outperform the small iteration and release cycles all the Agile practices advocate.
Another practice seen in Agile implementations is the idea of working on features and projects serially verses in parallel, in essence reducing the need to multitask. The concept of a multitasking time penalty is real, and directly impacts the time-to-market metric of any company or business. To learn more about how serial product development can significantly improve your time to market, listen to the Benefits of Focused Work vs Multitasking podcast episode. Removing or reducing multitasking in a development team can easily improve time-to-market for feature development as high as 50%, if not even more.
Increased Productivity
Typically, increased productivity in teams and business comes from having a clearly defined backlog of features that are maintained in priority order at all times. This allows teams and business groups to focus on the most important need of the company or customer. It also helps eliminate what is termed “waste”, or work that provides no direct value or benefit. To learn more about waste elimination and how it can help, listen in to the podcast episode on Improving Results through Waste Elimination.
Another aspect of Agile that directly increases productivity is the constant feedback loops the various practices implement. Whether it’s a post-mortem, retrospective, project wrap-up or daily stand-up escalation, feedback is consistent, fluid, and transparent encouraging teams and individuals to focus on the solutions and resolve issues quickly.
Measurement of productivity increase can easily be monitored via burn-up/burn-down indicators which are real-time visible to the teams doing the work, as well as management of the organization. The teams doing the work own the indicators, and directly control their tracking to their committed plan, which involves identifying and resolving issues that would prevent the completion of their planned work. By measuring the output of teams over a static development interval in place, a direct observation of increased productivity can be objectively observed.
Improvements in Quality
The last things business want to deal with is customers finding issues that negatively impact their customer base as well as their organization. Agile practices preach the identification of defects and bugs earlier in the product development process which in turn improves the overall quality of the product going out to their user base. There are several benefits of identifying and resolving issues earlier in product development, including reduced cost to fix the issues since future work is not interrupted, and keeping quality as a key pillar for a company to exemplify with their customer base.
Another area Agile helps support improved product quality is through the development practice of smaller functional features and end-to-end testing earlier in the process. By reducing features/requirements to small usable slices of the product, the teams themselves are able to test earlier simulating a user experience, and not just focusing on component and targeted tested which may not directly simulate how a user would intend to utilize the feature.
Indicators for defects, bugs, and customer complaints are fairly easy to track, and most companies already have processes in place to monitor these issues. Any improvement by changing over to an Agile process will easily be seen down the road through these existing indicators by watching customer issues decrease over time.
There are many other benefits to Agile implementations, however businesses should at least expect to achieve anywhere in the 10-75% improvement across employee morale, time-to-market, productivity, and quality by implementing and consistently supporting Agile practices.