It only took three years for Airbnb to go from an idea in someone’s living room to booking accommodations for 700,000 guests. Uber needed just two years to evolve from its founding to raising millions in capital. While there may still be a place for the five-year plan, today’s leaders are working on five-month, five-week, even five-day plans. They are creating agile teams designed to fail fast, produce rapid prototypes, continuously learn and innovate quickly.
THE BIRTH OF AGILE
“Agile is a kind of manufacturing system for new ideas. It is the practice that enables organizations to act on their new ideas,” says Tim Brown, IDEO CEO. “It is important to emphasize, however, that Agile is not where the new ideas come from. It is how they are rapidly iterated, improved and deployed.”
Merriam-Webster defines the adjective “agile” as “marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace.” In the world of work, the term Agile is often used as a noun, as referenced by Brown, describing a concept born from a set of 12 principles written in the 2001 Agile Manifesto, a guide for software development teams. Today, Agile is not only used by IT groups, but has become known to increase success rates and speed up the development and implementation of new ideas across diverse disciplines. The principles of Agile work include:
- Satisfying the customer with early, consistent and continuous deliverables.
- Focus on one project at a time versus working on concurrent projects.
- Fast, frequent, face-to-face team meetings—often standing—speed communication and track incremental progress.
- Engage customers in hands-on product testing for immediate feedback.
Agile is commonly paired with the Scrum framework which includes activities like Sprints, Stand Up Meetings and roles such as the Scrum Master. (See Glossary of Terms)
“We knew in order to deliver product faster and iterate quicker, you needed small teams working in short cycles,” says Dr. Jeff Sutherland, one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto and co-author of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. “Today, your smartphone’s software is updated every couple of weeks and that’s slow. Amazon has a thousand Scrum teams and they deploy a new feature every 11.6 seconds.”