The agile methodology and the adoption of agile practices in the management of projects/products is an aspect that has been growing surprisingly in recent years, mainly due to the clear advantages that this type of model has been providing, such as improved IT/business alignment and enhanced software quality.

This growth in the adoption of an Agile methodology has come up against the culture change in traditional environments. The main reasons for companies adopting Agile methodologies are related to delivery speed, better management of changing priorities and increased productivity.

The potential for adapting the agile methodology and the paradigms that need to be broken in a traditional work environment are the main points for the successful implementation of the agile culture – especially when starting from a traditionalist and hierarchical culture, something that is highly found in companies that have not yet adopted the Agile methodology.

Source: Deal

By the end of 2021, close to 75% of large enterprises in Latin America will put a mechanism in place to shift to cloud-centric infrastructure and applications twice as fast (agile) as before the pandemic (IDC Latin).

The Latin American economy remains on its digital destiny with 40% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to be digitalized by 2022, driving $460 billion of IT spending from 2020 to 2023, forecasts the International Data Corporation (IDC).

Through 2023, reactions to changed workforce and operations practices during the pandemic are the dominant accelerators for 50% of edge-driven investments and business model changes in most industries in Latin America. (International Data Corporation IDC Future Scape 2021)

IT UPGRADING DUE TO INCREASING CLOUD SOURCES

With the increasing cloud migrations and options of cloud services, IT outsourcing has become more than a simple cost reduction technique. Therefore, this new form is driven by organizational motivations in terms of business growth, customer experience, and competitive disruption.

More importantly, such increased preference amongst the newer and even smaller organizations has led the vendors of the market to increasingly focus on driving out a way to integrate the offshore team with the on-site. Another critical aspect driven by small-scale players is toward agility in vendors offering and refers to the time-to-market which must be agile.

Source: Mordor Intelligence

The 12 principles of Agile Methodology

The basic guide for following the agile methodology are listed in the following 12 principles:

1. The highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Absorb changing requirements throughout the development process.
3. Deliver working software frequently, on a regular weekly or monthly basis.
4. Business people and developers must collaborate throughout the project.
5. Motivate and support people involved in the process, and trust them to get the job done.
6. Face-to-face interactions are more likely to be efficient communication.
7. Delivering working software is the ultimate factor that measures progress.
8. Agile processes promote a consistent, repeatable, sustainable and maintainable development pace.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simplicity – develop just enough to get the job done.
11. Self-organizing teams create quality architectures, requirements, and designs.
12. The team must regularly reflect on how to become more effective, making adjustments for process-improvement.

Agile Application Practices

There are some very important requirements for the successful deployment of agile approaches, according to studies undertaken by the University of Twente Enschede, the Netherlands and India’s Tata Research, Development and Design Centre:

1. understanding requirements for successful deployment in large outsourced projects;
2. prioritization criteria in the setting of large agile projects is a risk-value process.

When referring to large projects in large organizations, the study advises to include the following steps: compose an interview questionnaire; have the questionnaire revised by an experienced researcher; undertake a pilot interview to check the applicability of the questionnaire in a real-life experience; carry out in-depth interviews with practitioners using the questionnaire and work with participants who possess deeper knowledge of a more specific perspective.

https://dev.to/woodjessica/types-of-agile-methodology-2021-3l6i

Agility Catching Fire Reports McKinsey & Company Survey

Agility, while still in its early days, is catching fire in a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey report of 2,500 business leaders. According to the results, few companies have achieved organization-wide agility but many have already started pursuing it in performance units. Nearly one-quarter of performance units are agile. The remaining performance units in companies lack dynamism, stability, or both.

High tech, telecom, financial services, and media and entertainment appear to be leading the pack with the greatest number of organizations undertaking agility transformations.

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